Labels: Fat Wreck Chords
Review by: Ian Cavell
I can never resist the lure of buying CD’s / merchandise at gigs. Which is why the Fat Wreck showcase gig at London’s Astoria could have cost me an arm and a leg if I’d actually remembered to go to the bank before hand. Anyway – it turned out that No use For The Name were exceptionally good live so ‘Making Friends’ became involved in a cash for album exchange on the way out.
Kicking off with a little snippet of unneccesitated swearing ‘The Answer Is Still No’ explodes forth… and the sound is undeniably ‘Fat Wreck’. It’s also pretty damn good. Passionate, driving punk-rock of a high quality, with stand out tracks such ‘A Postcard Would Be Nice’, ‘Sitting Duck’ and ‘On The Outside’ really hitting home. The latter in particular is explosive and the addition of a female vocalist gives extra depth to the NUFAN sound. The well travelled Dicky Barrett contributes additional growling on ‘Growing Down’ which, in keeping with the other 11 tracks, excels.
‘Making Friends’ is one of the albums that rarely veers from the well trodden punk-rock path so a track-by-track account would just be silly : track 1 has some fast paced drumming and is 1min54s long, track 2 has some slightly faster paced drumming and is 1min34 long….and so on. Maybe they were ‘saving up’ their innovativeness for final track ‘Fields Of Athenry’ which utilises the unlikely tools of destruction : the Uilleann Pipes and the Tin Whistle. Kind of like the Levellers for half a minute – before punk once again takes control. It’s a truly great track, as is the bonus track which contains the ultimate ‘cheese’ guitar riff.
NUFAN are in no way original, but if they continue to turn out albums that contain such high quality punk-rock as ‘Making Friends’ they’ll get no complaints from this quarter.