Album Review: NOFX - Self Entitled

If you do anything for nearly 30 years, you're going to end up repeating yourself. NOFX repeat themselves more than most, but they still sound as merry as they ever did, three decades and 12 studio albums in. As with everything since Liberal Animation, the only respite you'll get from the relentless piss-takery and snotty vocals is the tiny pause between tracks. But it's worked for so long, so why stop now?

On the whole, there's less – not that NOFX were ever Mr. Bungle – in the way of cute, for-the-sake-of-it genre switching, with no reggae or jazz interludes to break things up. “It's our first totally punk album in 20 years,” frontman Fat Mike has said, and it's, well, pretty punk. Things open with the Linoleum-ish 72 Virgins, which, in typical NOFX fashion, sounds an awful lot like everything else they do, and manages to blend political pacifism with infantile jokes.

Years ago Mike sang “I miss the days of Reagan punk”, and he has – yes, in the year 2012 – managed to include an anti-Gipper song on SE. Ronnie & Mags might get kids at the Vans Warped tour worked up about the Contras and the Granada invasion, but it seems a little strange to bother in this day and age. There's plenty of in-jokes between the band and its long-time fans. For example in I've Got One Jealous Again, Again, which is both a sorta sad break-up song and a wink to anybody who's heard The War On Errorism. They don't care if we think they're stuck in a time warp, and you wouldn't care either if you were having this much fun.