C.O.F.F.I.N • Children Of Finland Fighting In Norway • LP

Erste Theke Tonträger

The 3rd full-length from this brilliant but underrated power-pop band and I have to say I’m completely blown away again. I generally have a pretty low tolerance for bubblegum-punk, but Nancy do it absolutely perfectly. As on their earlier releases, they still sound a lot like the Jabbers thanks to their straightforward punk arrangements and rather high-pitched vocals, though Nancy are even sillier and more over the top than the Jabbers (this is like Muff Divers-level silliness I’m talking about here!).

At its core, this is simple, Ramones-influenced punk, and at the end of the day could be compared with 90s bands like the Queers or 00s bands like the Spits as anything else, and while that is a very crowded tradition, Nancy separate themselves from the pack with truly great songs. You may not want to like this, but once it’s on your turntable I guarantee you’ll have a very, very difficult time removing it.

There are a lot of options out there for dumb, sing-songy punk, but for my money Nancy are right at the top of the heap. I mean, it’s your basic second-and-third-Ramones-LP influenced stuff (though their newer stuff is a hair more musically sophisticated and borders on power-pop), but the execution is completely flawless and the gleeful sense of absurdity is totally infectious. I mean, this is the band that has their own sea shanty!

It’s no secret that we are enthusiastic devotees of Joe Sussman’s work—he’s also a key player in Nancy as well as Dangus Tarkus and the outstanding MUFF DIVERS Dreams of the Gentlest Texture is the best thing he’s done so far. I’ve wasted a lot of time thinking (and having idle conversations, mostly with Seth and Jeff) about what makes a Muff Divers song different from a Nancy song or a Dangus Tarkus song, but I’m not sure there’s an answer to that riddle. The more important thing to note here is that—as good as all of those projects’ releases have been for some time now—each new one seems to be better than the last, and this is the best one yet.