I'm sitting here drinking a beer to wash down a turkey melt I just made with my George Foreman Grill. Jason Kubel just hit a home run against the Brewers to tie up the game in the bottom of the fifth. The sun is shining, I'm wearing shorts, and there's a fan blowing in the corner. It's not officially summer but it's close enough. Summer always makes me think of feel good records. Albums that cause you to reflect to those dog day summers of your youth where you sat near lakes, oceans, pools, water sprinklers, until you rushed home on your bike to get another grape Flavor-Ice or a tall glass of Kool-Aid. Maybe a little later in your younger days your thoughts turned to thought of girls and you spied on the older girls down the street as they sunbathed in bikinis. You'd always get caught being a little creep but summer after summer you sensed the girls didn't mind so much.
All these summers had a soundtrack. It may have started out with Poison and ended with the Descendents but there's always a song that when played will instantly remind of humid days at the County Fair. These songs are records that are comprise the feel good records of the year. These songs always come up in summer. Spring soundtracks were full of rainy days and sad artists. Fall was all about making it through school and winter was just too harsh to think of anything pleasent.
No Use for a Name has never been part of that list even though they have been around for twenty years. Honestly, I haven't listened to them since Leche Con Carne and I can tell that No Use for a Name hasn't really changed the formula since then. They still sound like NOFX but a bit more radio friendly and less goofy. They still write the same old fast melodic hardcore that Fat Wreck once had monopoly of in the mid-90's. I don't how a band that's been around for two decades can put out the same album over and over again. Sure maybe No Use for a Name was a bit more hardcore during their New Red Archives day, but since then it's been the same hooks, choruses, and verses that's been every album. The Feel Good Record of the Year does some off the wall things like use some keyboards to intro a song and there's a horrid stab at an acoustic ditty, nevertheless, this is exactly what you expect from No Use For a Name. If that's good enough for you, then you probably own more board shorts that I ever will.
