I Farm

So My Kids Don't Have To [reissue] (2005)

Jordan Rogowski

Most of the kids that complain about the Warped Tour have a real misguided sense of what it should be about. It's not 1996 anymore; No Use for a Name and Face to Face aren't at the top of the game. Good punk bands still exist, but it's much fewer and farther between than the EpiFat era that's held in such high regard. I Farm is the type of band that would have played Warped during its heydey, and So My Kids Won't Have To is a blistering collection of 18 raucous tracks.

Those 18 tracks are played in 30 minutes, so that already should give you at least a relative idea of what kind of music Ifarm are playing. It's loud, fast, and right to the point. There's no whimsical instrumental passages, no extravagant guitar solos, just an all-out musical blitzkrieg that would make any punk band proud. The brash, snotty vocals are full of political and social rhetoric, although it becomes pretty difficult at times to really even comprehend that. "Young Republican" isn't as fast and angry as they usually come on the album, but the stinging lyrics add the edge that not every song may carry;

Just another young Republican, with a brand new suit and tie that his parents bought for him / He can't seem to legitimize, he's a homophonic, sexist piece of shit /… / Try to pacify someone who fights for their name, why not break their very hands and watch them go insane / I saw a sign today that read ‘Pro-life! Pro-family!'

If it's not the lyrics that draw you in, the raw conviction and venomous vocal delivery of the band's singer on tracks such as "All Punks Go to Hell" and "Knucklehead" will. The instrumentation is pretty standard fare, but the impact really can't be underestimated, as these guys play with the utmost energy at all times, and the pummeling distortion and solid rhythms are perfectly suited for the type of music being played. Possibly best of all is that only one song breaches the two-minute mark, while all of the others have sufficiently rocked your face off in around a minute and a half. As solid of a flow as the album may have, it does have a definite problem: Nothing really sticks on the first listen, or the second…or the third. It's not that they aren't good songs; quite the contrary, you could easily listen to any song randomly and enjoy it, but you won't be saying, "oh man, 'Milkbomb' is one of the best songs I've heard in months!" You won't be saying this because it's pretty difficult to distinguish it from the other 17 tracks on the album.

All this said, it's still a terrific, fast, noisy punk rock record full of attitude and awareness. Definitely worth a shot.