Review Summary: NOFX's hand-me-down shoes.
Snarky movie snippet -- pitter pat, pitter pat, pitter pat. A wayward heel thrust to the groin, a rebellious collective of erected fists, immediate wall-to-wall panic, and a newly acquired aneurysm from the harangues of the first salient chord. The melody-happy pop punk duo Boardroom Heroes from D.C. have just made their ritual introduction.
Boardroom Heroes, their self-titled debut with hooks well spent, sidesteps rehearsed tales of a smitten pop punk balladeer. Chipper guitar chords and NOFX-seasoned vocals co-pilot proverbial face slaps at the racketeer bureaucrats of the Bellevue. Not exactly the Propagandhi slaughterhouse effect-- but then again, you don’t have to be a Noam Chomsky just to make a statement.
On "The Beautiful", “We are heritage, we are monuments, we are scars that never heal/We are the pain that everyone else knows but we will never feel”, cries out Andre Pagliarini, in an uphill battle of smothered youth rising over the mellow drum ticks and harmonious triumph, with an obedient bass-line following the ascending order.
Admittedly, the lyrics exude a wealth of interpretive value through their ink-matted pores; so much that some almost seem religious. However, head songwriter Pagliarini explains, “The track Ishmael is actually a reference to the novel by Daniel Quinn about the self-aggrandizing mythologies of man. At its heart, it is a song about conservation and respect for the natural world. Silver & Coal, somewhat in the same vein, is about how in spite of all the advances, both technological and otherwise, that we have made as a civilization we still have quite little to show for it.”
From the public service announcement of woah-oh’s and ah-ah’s in "Flat Tires", to the ruthless energies plummeting "Expat" and "Sister City", you are bound to subject your older sister to the beleaguerment of tone-deaf crooning that will make her beg the question, “What do you wanna do with your life?”
Not a piece of ground gets broken here, there's not even a blip on the meteorological scale. But if stripped down feathery fun is your addiction, this album demolishes those pesky halfway houses in solidarity. And once you've broken free, you just might find yourself thanking them for all the shoes.
