Stiff Little Fingers
No Going Back [Reissue]
(earMUSIC)
As the snobby record store clerk in High Fidelity points out, Green Day essentially ripped off Stiff Little Fingers. The Belfast punks had a great, but criminally underrated run from the late 70s through the early 80s before reforming again a few years later. Nowhere is there brilliance more evident than on No Going Back, the two-disc re-issue of their 2014 effort.
The band is a little less sloppy than their earliest albums showed; the production is a little cleaner, but that just serves to better highlight the guitars and Jack Burns’ fantastic vocals. The genesis of this record goes back to 2007, when Burns first announced the band was working on new songs. The opening track on the record, “Liar’s Club” was actually written about George W. Bush and Tony Blair and their roles in the Iraq war, but the sentiments are just as relevant today with Donald Trump and Theresa May having taken their places. Even a song like “I Just Care About Me,” seems to be tailor-made for 2017 society. Of the dozen or so tracks that make up No Going Back, there is not a single song that doesn’t deserve to be on the record. This reissue is paired with a second disc of demos and acoustic versions of “My Dark Places” and “When We Were Young.”
The late 70s was the perfect climate for punk rock to take root, and 2017 is proving to be just fertile.
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