Oeuf!

There is a school of thought that posits that the egg is the most beautiful shape found in nature. Over aeons reptiles and birds have evolved* their eggs for maximum efficiency and practicality, emerging with a shape that has the added bonus of aesthetic perfection.

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Such musings have fuck all to do with today’s off-ering, except by way of being a feeble pun on the band’s name. Deal with it. Off! Live From The BBC. This was recorded by my favourite ongoing** hardcoreistas in 2014 and released as a limited edition 10″ LP for RSD 2015*^.

The set list for Live At The BBC is almost completely culled from the Wasted Years LP, one from Off! and a trifecta of tracks from 2010’s First Four EPs. It’s a doozy, 10 tracks in 15:49, no hanging about, no messing around, no time wasters here.

Off! rattle through their set as you’d expect, but there is absolutely nothing sloppy here at all, everything is really precise and energized. It still fascinates me how they can pack so much into a track like ‘Red White And Black’ that it seems so much longer than it is.

Virtually every track is a highlight here, Keith Morris is still a superb punk singer^ and the musicianship, as you have a right to expect from Dimitri Coats, Mario Rubalcaba and Steven McDonald is absolutely top notch. You can hear every word, which is important when the lyrics are this good.

I am not a huge fan of live LPs despite, as Bruce Connection rightly points out, owning a goodly number of them. They have to add something for me to be interested in them, just playing the tracks faster, with an extra solo and some added audience noise … nah.

Live At The BBC is a studio session so bang goes the audience noise for starters but Off! do an interesting thing here. They use the session to really boil down the essence of the tracks here, they add even more vehemence^^ to the music and a real cutting precision.

The better songs are from Wasted Years but the most interesting cuts are ‘Poison City’ and ‘Darkness’ from their early EPs, both seem to have been given a harder, sharper edge in this incarnation.

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Off! are simply a righteous band, I would do almost anything to see them live, including some things which any morally, spiritually, or physically hygienic person would baulk at. I’m not proud, well just a bit.

Now, oeuf you go.

1100 Down.

*or if you’re an evolution denier, the great green pixie willed it to be so, possibly last Tuesday afternoon.

**I can type ‘ongoing’ as, after a 7 year hiatus they have recently contributed to the recent Metallica beanfeast, bettering the original with their version of ‘Holier Than Thou’ and cutting a brilliant video starring David Yow, to boot:

*^currently available for about £8 less than I paid 6 years ago, c’est la vie as we Welsh say.

^the dude is now 65, which given his past is an achievement in itself.

^^took me 3 goes to spell vehemence correctly.