Daily Loaf

What do you do after 20 years of confounding mainstream-music expectations — during which, despite your best intentions, you’ve become bigger than many of the bands that personified the process and culture you so effectively eschewed? If you’re NOFX bassist and singer (not to mention Fat Wreck Chords founder) “Fat” Mike Burkett, you begin to drop your alternately provocative and hilarious persona/guard, and show a bit more of your true self to those fans that have stuck around long enough to deserve it.

Just a bit. A little, little bit.

It began with NOFX’s 2008 behind-the-scenes road-show for Fuse TV, Backstage Passport, which showed the band not only snorting bizarre drugs in Singapore and getting into fights with the crowd in Israel, but also engaging in the kind of bonding, stressing and emotional outbursts for which Burkett’s ingeniously dumb, pissed-off-and-funny facade previously had no use. And it continued earlier this year with the release of the full-length LP, Coaster, which featured among the usual loud-and-fast snide-and-smart, an earnest paean to Burkett’s parents, both of whom passed away in 2006, called “My Orphan Year.” Cokie the Clown, a quintet of tunes left over from the Coaster sessions, features a truly touching acoustic version of “My Orphan Year,” made all the more conspicuous due to lack of distortion and the EP’s brevity.

Elsewhere, the band continues to blast away in trademark caustic style — “Cokie The Clown,” about a showboating enabler of a hanger-on, has all the elements of an instant classic — but the mere presence of a more intimate facet of the band’s personality lends the whole disc, and the whole perception of NOFX, a welcome and refreshing new perspective.

Posted in Music, Music Review | Leave a comment