Fidlar“I drink cheap beer/so what, fuck you!” is the chorus on Cheap Beer, the first track FIDLAR's self-titled debut. This, as it turns out, is the tone setter. FIDLAR (Fuck It Dog, Life's A Risk) are a four-piece LA punk group and sound pretty much as you'd expect them to from that basic description and lyrical excerpt. The riffs are dirty and tight, the percussion neat and accompanied by no-nonsense basslines and high energy half-sung half-screamed vocals. But don't infer that these lads do anything by halves.
This is one of the most solid and, frankly, exciting debut punk records in recent years. Musically, the band touch on all the classic punk and pop-punk movements from the mid-'80s to now, all done with hard-edged and youthful energy. Lyrically, with lines like “Get pissed up by the hills/cocaine and shitty pills”, the lads aren't aiming for a level outside of their genre's well-trodden discourse of substance use/abuse, but there's something charming in the purity of their tone. Hell, when a band open and close an album with songs Cheap Beer and Cocaine, is substance restraint really what you want?
An odd misstep is the frustratingly misogynist Whore, which keeps the album from even escaping the basic parameters the group set for themselves. Despite this hiccup, perhaps predictable for the genre, the album is a success. It doesn't necessarily do anything that you haven't heard before, and there's nary a moment here that doesn't mention getting drunk or high. But this is dumb, obnoxious, energetic and childish fun – and god it's done brilliantly.
