OFF!
OFF!'s debut LP, which comes in just shy of First Four EPs' runtime, again finds Keith Morris venting spleen at anything and everything. This time out, though, his targets seem softer and a little harder to pin down.
When singer Keith Morris cofounded Black Flag and Circle Jerks in the late ’70s, punk seemed as likely to implode as endure. Thirty years later, Morris formed the supergroup Off!—and it too seemed similarly liable to flame out. Off!’s bold, berserk 2010 debut, First Four EPs, burned more calories than Morris had…
When OFF! collected their first handful of seven-inch singles onto 2010’s The Four EPs, they perhaps unknowingly proved…
After storming out of the gates with 2010's First Four EPs, OFF! continue to make their intentions clear with a self-titled album that picks up right where their last collection left off.
In a time when even your average beatdown-heavy 'hardcore' band sounds polished, pristine and conventional, OFF!'s self-titled debut in all its 17-minute glory is a brazen, full-on salute to the routine destruction – both self and civil – of the LA punk scene some 30-odd years ago. With Keith Morris (Black Flag, Circle Jerks) on pipes, the album is a crash course in how to use the four-chord weaponry of old today without sounding tired or contrived.
Cali punks Off!'s debut album isn't as good as their early singles – but then that's something of a hardcore tradition, writes <strong>Jamie Thomson</strong>