(Vice)
RECOMMENDED
Happy New Year! Welcome to 1981, where we have some thrash for you. It's like Pink Flag is brand new and the Replacements' graduation to swank songwriting never happened. The misleadingly named First Four EPs is the product of what amounts to a supergroup in hardcore punk parlance, so not really much of a supergroup (no Jeff Beck in sight), which is good. OFF! is the project primarily of Keith Morris of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, it races along at a clip, dropping its sixteen songs in barely eighteen furious minutes. Doesn't sound too appealing, and the cover is godawfully ugly, but don't underestimate the timelessness of the brash, obnoxious garage sound. Morris pushes it along perfectly, with a youthfully disaffected snarl. It's nothing original, nothing even particularly special or offbeat -- but it's a liberating noise, still as ever.
Besides Morris, the band consists of members of Red Kross, Burning Brides, and Rocket from the Crypt, none of whom have the name recognition of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, but one doesn't need to be schooled in the first wave of hardcore to enjoy the abrasive, violently brief (all run about a minute) songs here. If your taste for direct plunges into stabbing, minimal, impossibly loud punk haven't diminished with age any more than Morris', you'll fall hard for this record; ignore the stoopid cover.
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