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Music

OFF! - 'OFF!'

The world may be truly fucked up, but on the West Coast, they’re still making excellent punk records and it feels like the future is bright.

OFF!
OFF!

VICE, 2012

  • favorites:

    "Wrong," "Borrow and Bomb," "Vaporized"

  • Flavors:

    Surfboard wax, sunblock, beer, chipped teeth

RATING:

TRACK LIST:

  • Wiped Out
  • I Got News For You
  • Elimination
  • Cracked
  • Wrong
  • Borrow and Bomb
  • Toxic Box
  • Man From Nowhere
  • Jet Black Girls
  • King Kong Brigade
  • Harbor Freeway Blues
  • Feelings are Meant to be Hurt
  • Vaporized
  • 503
  • Zero for Conduct
  • I Need One (I Want One)

The OFF! record makes me want to move to Santa Monica and get pregnant and have babies. So much in our world today is so truly fucked up and only getting worse, but on the West Coast, they’re still making excellent punk records and it feels like the future is bright. This could be a good world to raise punk rock babies in.

To say that OFF! is a hardcore supergroup is irrelevant; what matters is that they know exactly what they’re doing. OFF!’s album, 16 tracks of explosive vitriol, clocks in at under 16 minutes and is totally exactly correct. OFF! hearkens back to the genesis of West Coast punk rock, the freaky LSD/Manson Family/Surf Rock roots, and updates it for the 21st century. OFF! combines equal parts brute strength and frontal lobe. It’s loud, it’s vital, urgent, but it’s also catchy, smart, not stupid.

This record provides an airtight case for the claim that, though it may have been invented elsewhere, punk rock (like hip-hop) evolved on the West Coast, blossomed in the California sunshine, and was perfected in Los Angeles.