Album Review: Fidlar - Fidlar

Feel like listening to a pack of snotty, hedonistic hoodrats singing about the myriad (and not very complex) joys of being a pack of snotty, hedonistic hoodrats? Boy, do young LA skate-punks FIDLAR (a skating acronym for 'Fuck It Dog, Life's A Risk') have an album for you!

Opening track Cheap Beer sets the template for what's to follow: the first stanza, “Getting fucked up on the 101/Shooting our guns and having fun/40 beers later and a line of speed/Eight-ball of blow and half a pound of weed” belts into the petulant chorus of “I drink cheap beer! So what? Fuck you!” – anyone can write such riotous lyrics, the trick is making it sound believable and FIDLAR deliver.

The songs are an unremitting glimpse into a reckless existence (White On White, Gimmie Something, Cocaine), although they balance this by showing that it's not all fun and games – check the remorse of No Waves, the repugnant insight of Stoked And Broke and the hidden bonus track which finds vocalist Zac Carper living in a car and pissing in bottles. Musically it's a winning amalgam of recent garage sounds (Blackout Stout sounds like they actually ate Black Lips, while the bratty call-and-response of 5 To 9 sounds heaps like Wavves) and older punk fare (tellingly, the father of the band's two brothers was in TSOL).

FIDLAR contains so many tales of drunken and drugged debauchery that you wonder how they have time to be in a band (let alone pay for all their swag). It's base and shameless garage punk but works so well because (a) it's done with such conviction, and (b) the songs are really fucking great. Too much fun.