Album Review – Self Entitled, NOFX

Self Entitled is a fitting name for NOFX’s twelfth studio album. Most of the album feels like nothing more than a platform for lead singer “Fat Mike” Burkett to parade around his baggage.

That’s not to say it isn’t good, just a little heavy in parts. Almost completely missing are the goofy/satirical songs that earned the band its following; in their place come depressing, introspective numbers about abandonment, drug abuse and divorce. Technically speaking, the band is as solid as ever, kicking all kinds of ass on tracks like Cell Out, I Believe in Goddess and the Reagan-bashing Ronnie & Mags, but something seems amiss;. this is not the same band that recorded their last album, Coaster, in 2009.

To find out why that is, one probably doesn’t have to look much further than the song I’ve Got One Jealous Again, Again, a sequel to the 2003 track We Got Two Jealous Agains. The original depicted Fat Mike falling for a girl with an eerily similar record collection to his own; the sequel tells the heartbreaking story of their 2010 divorce. The difference between the two songs is night and day, and provides a stark view into the current mindset of one of punk rock’s longest lasting, drug-addled ironmen.

That woe-is-me mood underlies the entire album, making Self-Entitled NOFX’s heaviest, most hopeless offering to date.

Braden Dupuis
Sports Writer