Off With Their Heads – Be Good LP (Epitaph Records)

As some the band members of the longstanding Minneapolis band Off With Their Heads have already stated, previous albums were much more about moping around and feeling sorry for yourself, but Be Good is less about feeling sorry for yourself and more about accepting how goddamn miserable you are. Be Good is a demonstration of anger, despair, willingness to change our surroundings, but without any power to actually do it. The honesty of their lyrics is so relentless, brutal, truthful, it hits you right in the face, but it comes as a wake-up call. At least, the atmosphere on this record is somewhere in between those comparations, but to be fair, Off With Their Heads came a long way through productionally and Be Good is a giant step further with tons of great tunes. Forced acceptance is a pretty much-explored theme in their lyrics and the band is focusing about facing reality through the ferocity of the Ryan Young’s vocals and his ability to express his feelings about this world through aggressiveness of his singing style. The rest of the band keeps their classic approach to the punk rock music, so the songs are punchy to fit up to Ryan’s vocals, but melodic enough to satisfy the cravings of the punk rock community. Luckily, the band have the ability to write some proper tunes, so you’ll find the tons of great ones such as Disappear, No Love, Take Me Away, Tear Me Apart, Let It All, Severe Errand, but as it’s almost a tradition with all the Off With Their Heads records, you will probably be satisfied with an entire material, because the band is serving some large portions of raw emotions, bitter feelings, aggressiveness, but it’s packed with a lot of sense to satisfy even the pickiest fans of their music. The album comes with a great cover photo taken by Patricia Hummel and it’s been published by Epitaph Records on all the possible physical and digital formats.