Ribbed (LP)

Ribbed (LP)

Before NOFX became the fathers of humorous but hard-edged punk rock, they were just four pretty obnoxious Californians with a penchant for fast music and dirty jokes. Ribbed isn’t exactly the group’s break­through into content filled rock, but their typically hard-edged punk has enough dirty humor that anyone with their mind in the gutter should at least get few smirks over the course of the record.

Besides the sophomoric gross out of “The Moron Brothers” and the double-entendre ridden “Together on the Sand,” none of these songs have even made it into the later live shows of the band, and the reason is pretty obvious. Among tracks about not showering and fake boobs, the group runs through their typical gamut of punk styles, but there is nothing as immediately catchy or edgy as their later work and more often than not the songs are far from memorable high speed rants about nothing.

NOFX completeists may feel a need to place this record in their collections, but the odds are, in light of the band’s much more impressive later work, that it will rarely merit listening and, when it does, will probably be more for reminiscing than for actual enjoyment. NOFX are a great punk rock band, but Ribbed is a rocky start that falls way to short way too often.