If I went back to every NOFX review I’ve written since Pump Up The Valium, one central theme has come across – enough with the joke songs already! NOFX may have made their reputation two decades ago for being crass, juvenile, and deceptively skilled in writing melodic punk/hardcore jams, but the 2 or 3 joke songs per full-length ran its course and only served to drag momentum down. It was as if NOFX stopped paying heed to the value of a cohesive full-length and were really just happy to come out of the studio with a handful of staples that they could work in their live set. With another album in hand, their 12th, Self-Entitled is a short burst of aggressive melodicore that does away with the hokey gimmickry and fits almost perfectly into the parameters of  1993′s Ribbed.

Pauses are virtually absent among Self-Entitled’s 29 minutes and Fat Mike’s lyrics track in some ways the serious, yet still satirical and brutally honest shift seen on Coaster. “I Got One Jealous Again, Again” barely masks the discomfort of divorce, while “72 Hookers” is Fat Mike at his finest perch, untangling religion, war, repression, and still cracking a smile along the away. The fiery guitar solo on “She Didn’t Lose Her Baby” distracts from the cutting drug abuse related lyrics, so it feels a little strange to be stoked on such a rampaging song among its nearly unbearable sadness.

“Rampaging” in fact is a word that sticks in my head on Self-Entitled – it’s been a long time since NOFX sounded this straight-forwardly aggressive and the stripped down buzzy recording pays massive dividends. Listen to Self-Entitled and So Long and Thanks For All The Shoes and the sonic differences are jaw-dropping. Fat Mike’s voice has lost some its melody and bite, but the songs aren’t worse for the wear. The drums thwack with life, turning aside some of the clickity-clack that the band helped make famous, and the guitars pulse with a steady hurricane-like roar. It’s not quite an old-school early 80s sound (the modern loudness is definitely present), but it’s a welcome turn of events. Fat Mike and company may continue to joke about mailing it in and embracing their role as aging punks somehow cruising through their pre-retirement years while taking your money to mostly see a live comedy show with musical segments in between, but there’s nothing slacking on Self-Entitled, and despite the rhetoric, NOFX continue to take deep pride in their work.

Fat Wreck