OFF! - Wasted Years

OFF!
Wasted Years
8 April 2014
Vice

3.5 stars out of 5

 

The template for hardcore punk—LA-style—was set in stone in the late 1970s by bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Fear, and the Germs. OFF!’s Keith Morris sang for two of those bands, so it’s impossible to accuse him of copying or plagiarizing a scene which began over 35 years ago since he was there (as James Murphy might say) and was integral to its creation in the first place. Now it’s 2014, but the sixteen songs that compose Wasted Years—and zip by in less than twenty-four minutes—could just as easily have written and recorded in 1979 (or 1984, or 1989, etc), except that here we have a nice and crisp drum sound rather than those trademark underwater-sounding SST percussives. Heck, even the cover art could be from 1979 (or 1984, or 1989, etc).

With a genre like hardcore punk (like other rigid, conservative genres), there’s always tension between remaining true to tradition (hence risking staleness) and exploding the pre-conceptions of what the genre should be and exploring what could be (see Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade or Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime for excruciatingly obvious examples of such exploding and exploring). The irony is, of course, that if you attempt to remake Damaged in 2014 it makes you a traditionalist (hence potentially stale), but if you try to build your own Zen Arcade you’ve crossed the border into what is now clearly demarcated as post-hardcore’s domain, and are no longer hardcore full-stop (unless you’re Fucked Up, and then you could put out a triple-LP based on the life of Anne Frank, featuring strings and a harpsichord, and still be called hardcore).

Wasted Years grows from the traditionalist soil, but it’s anything but stale—it’s got enough energy in its less than twenty-four minutes than most of the rest of the records that will be released in 2014 combined. Sure, it sounds just like any other hardcore record, but here’s where you must take a moment to stop and correct yourself: it’s all the other hardcore bands that are trying to sound exactly like Morris, not the other way around. When every single other band in the genre is trying to be exactly like you, you must be doing something right, and OFF! do it right in every single one of these sixteen songs.

reviewed by Richard Krueger