Keith Morris is the king of Los Angeles hardcore. There really shouldn't be any arguments. His EP with Black Flag, 1979's Nervous Breakdown, is that band's best recorded output. No offense to Henry Rollins, who released some great stuff with Black Flag, but it's true.
Upon leaving that seminal outfit, Morris formed another seminal outfit -- the Circle Jerks. Their Group Sex album is a hardcore and indeed a punk rock classic. Apparently, everything Morris touched turned to gold. The fact that he did it a third time with OFF! is just greedy.
"Writing songs with Keith is one of my favorite things to do where being in a band with him is concerned,” OFF!/Burning Brides man Dimitri Coats told this writer in 2022. “We spend a lot of time just fucking around, going to eat, shop for records, then we’ll come back and play the records that we bought. We’ll get fired up drinking coffee."
"I might smoke some weed, and we’ll just basically party like two kids after school who are discovering bands together. It’ll get to the point where we can’t take it anymore, and I’ll grab a guitar and start hammering away on it. He’ll be scribbling down words. In the case of the new album we’ve written, we went into really strange territory, and decided we wanted to experiment and approach an album a different way.”
If the Circle Jerks was essentially Morris continuing along the punk rock path that he first stepped on with Nervous Breakdown, OFF! was something else entirely. Far more experimental, throwing in jazz, psych-rock, noise, and just about anything else that took their collective fancy, OFF! was an exercise in uncompromising. And my god, did that mindset result in some incredible music.
When OFF! announced that they were splitting up, or at least going on hiatus, they simultaneously announced three farewell shows in New York and Chicago, and finally in their L.A. hometown. The shows also coincide with the release of their feature-length movie Free LSD. Based on the trailer, which sees Jack Black pop up in a guest role, the film looks nuts. We'll write about that soon.
But the show at The Belasco in Downtown Los Angeles was incredible. If anyone had any doubts about the popularity of OFF! in comparison to Morris' other groups, the line for the merch table was so long that those at the table didn't stop working through the entire set. The Circle Jerks reunion show at the Hollywood Palladium a few years ago saw similar results. What is it about Morris and merch? The man can shift it.
The songs blast by in a gloriously frenetic, anxiety-inducing whirr. The setlist is long enough to require multiple pieces of paper taped together on stage, and it's a career-spanner. Sax noises accent the left-field, lovingly brutal hardcore, as songs such as "Kill to be Heard" and "Ignored" rip us open.
The likes of "Void You Out" and "Red White & Black" hit some anthemic notes, but for the most part OFF! offers it's loving audience a challenge. One that we're all to happy to accept.
Earlier in the evening, Brooklyn punks Surfbort opened the show with a level of side-eyed contempt and 'tude-riddled fury rarely seen in a support.
Dani Miller formed the band and named it after a line in a Beyonce song, they've worked on a Gucci campaign, and they've written with Linda Perry. That's a lot of check marks in their favor already.
Opening with a manic "Hot Chix," the band swiftly moves into "Pretty Little Fucker." A cover of the Hollywood Squares' "Hillside Strangler" is a nice touch in L.A., though their own "Lot Lizard 93" is better.
Ones to watch for sure.
