If you think it seems like NOFX is always coming out with a new album, you wouldn’t be far off. The foursome, one of the longest- and hardest-working groups in punk music today, has been around for 20 years now and in that time period has released 12 full-length albums and 15 EPs.
You might also think that after all those albums, a band might start to sound just a little bit too much the same from album to album. Again, you’d be right. NOFX’s latest effort, the Regaining Unconsciousness EP, contains four songs from the band’s upcoming full-length War on Errorism, which is slated for a May 6 release, and in and of itself offers little to differentiate it from anything the group has previously released.
Although Regaining Unconsciousness contains tidbits of the elements that make NOFX a great group to listen to — namely, strong political slants, traditional three-chord instrumentation and witty lyrics — there are really no surprises here. Anyone who has heard an album by the band in the past few years will probably already have a good idea of what the EP and, consequently, the next album, will sound like.
From the group that penned the 12-minute political punk epic “The Decline,” which featured as themes everything from painkiller addiction to war, it should come as no surprise to learn that Regaining Unconsciousness is unapologetically political. Just a look at two of the EP’s track titles — “Idiots are Taking Over” and “Franco Un-American” shows both the political spin and the group’s trademark way with words.
This political framework sets up not only the album’s lyrical theme but also its artwork, which features a street scene involving zombies drinking coffee and talking on a cell phone, while two zombie police officers have apparently just beaten up a zombie civilian in the background. The political spin becomes even more apparent when considering one of the band’s best-selling T-shirts on its recent U.S. tour — it featured a picture of President Bush with the words “Not My President.”
As if the album art and lyrics weren’t enough, NOFX solidly grounds its collective political opinion in the words that appear on the CD sleeve. For example, “They put the mock in demockracy and you swallowed every hook. The sad truth is you would rather follow the school into the net cuz swimming alone at sea is not the kind of freedom you actually want.”
The band has made its political views abundantly clear over the course of the past few years, if not its entire career, but in the past the politics have always been doused with a good amount of humor and just plain absurdity in the non-politically charged songs. This element blurred on Regaining Unconsciousness, however, and perhaps this is one reason the EP seems somewhat lacking.
It is possible that, because this is just an EP and not a full-length, listeners can look forward to a greater variety of songs on War on Errorism. Yet it would have been in the band’s best interest to represent this variety better in the four tracks offered here, rather than concentrating almost solely on politics. Many fans like NOFX for many reasons, and Regaining Unconsciousness doesn’t do the job it could in reaching all of those fans.
To NOFX’s credit, however, there is a fifth track that features guitarist El Hefe describing the new album over excerpts of the rest of the album’s tracks. This offers promise and is probably a good move on the band’s part, as listeners will need a reason to buy the full-length after they’ve already bought four tracks from it on this EP.
All in all, Regaining Unconsciousness isn’t NOFX’s strongest or most diverse work, but in the context of its four-track format and the hope for more variety on the full-length album it teases, any NOFX fan will probably find it a worthy buy. Newer fans of the group may want to hold off for the finished product or check out one of the band’s previous releases.
Grade: B
