It’s taken Fat Mike thirty years to get to this point. “I don’t know who this person is, but I’ve seen this face before, a face I don’t want to face,” he mumbles “I don’t think I like me anymore”. As he reels off the reasons he doesn’t like himself, it’s a watershed moment for a band that have never seemed to offer any remorse or shame in their actions, and it’s totally necessary. ‘First Ditch Effort’ marks an overdue tonal shift for a punk-rock band three decades old.
If you’ve been a long-time fan NOFX, you’ll know that they didn’t need to make this album. It flies contrary to the face of their politically energised, apathetically personal punk rock politics; this is the band that once defined their mission statement as “total, self-debasement and not giving our all.” But after a rough few years of divorce, death and, erm, drop-kicking someone’s head, something needed to give. If you read their recent book ‘The Hepatitus Bathtub & Other Stories’, some of the subject matter here won’t be so surprising. That said, opener ‘Six Years On Dope’, a minute and a half frantic blast about drummer Smelly’s heroin addiction, is still eye-opening. Honest, gut-wrenching and self-loathing, it sets a new tone for a band that have previously been celebratory of their excessive drug use. Smelly sees himself as “a human trashcan, shortening my life-span,” caught up in the waste of his youth, years lost to drug abuse.
It’s a theme that runs throughout the album, the Linoleum-esque ‘California Drought’ seeing Fat Mike mixing his clean living with the recent water shortage in California. “I just gotta try it once, but I say no, cos I got three months” he spits, new-found sobriety clashing with his instinctual desire for a new high. Drugs permeate the album. From the conspiracy theory riffer ‘Sid & Nancy’, to the comical ‘Oxy Moronic’ assault on Big Pharma, peddling pills and the medical-industrial complex, the drugged-up comedown taints the album.
It’s not just a one-track record chiming on about drug abuse. It’s also an album that delves into troublesome relationships that haven’t been fully resolved, like on the venomous ‘Happy Father’s Day’ or the terrified experience of being in an abusive relationship akin to Vietnam on ‘Dead Beat Mom’. And Fat Mike’s revelation about his lengthy cross-dressing history on ‘I’m A Transvest-Lite’, mixes NOFX’s trademark humour with a candid struggle of accommodating his fetish into a macho punk-rock scene, succinctly summed up by Mike as “I’m not transgender, I’m just a lazy cross-dresser who thinks make-up is too much of an ordeal”.
The devastatingly apocalyptic closer ‘Generation Z’ finds Fat Mike terrified at the world’s prospects for his 11 year old daughter. It’s not a moment of Helen Lovejoy hysteria, but a sobering realisation that this civilization may potentially be on the brink of annihilation, “a world that is bleeding, like an animal in slaughter”, whilst simultaneously hoping that the next generation may grow up with optimism in combating corruption, steering humanity away from extinction. ‘First Ditch Effort’ finds NOFX with their guard down on a world that’s – both personally and politically – on the brink. All they can do is take a look in the mirror and work out where they can go next. But at least they’re finally looking.
MATTHEW WILSON