Despite the fact that punk was designed to focus on short songs, I’ve always loved a good long, epic punk song. Say whatever you want about Green Day, but their nine-minute opus, “Jesus of Suburbia,” is excellent. And, as much as I can’t stand NoFX, I admit that what they accomplished with “The Decline” was pretty amazing. And, also despite my intense dislike for NoFX, I have to admit that Fat Wreck Chords is pumping out one great album after another, and have been responsible for some of the best albums of 2016. So keeping that all in mind, I was really excited to hear Chixdiggit’s 2012, released on Fat Wreck, even though I didn’t really know much about the band. All the ingredients were there for this single-song, 24 minute EP to be right up my alley.

“2012” chronicles one of Chixdiggit’s tours from 2012, as the band travels from Europe, home to Canada, down to California, and then back up to Canada again. And that’s it! That’s the whole damn song. It’s not even like it chronicles a particularly interesting tour, or finds a way to tell it that’s all that interesting. It just tells us about every tour stop in mundane detail, often shoving too many syllables into lines, making the boring narrative a higher priority than any sort of lyrical rhythm. Who the hell cares how many t-shirts they bought at a gas station, or when they first met the guys from Masked Intruder? Thankfully, the song varies musically every few minutes, more of a series of songs fused together than actually one long musical piece, but the song is so lyrically dull and pointless I found myself too actively angry at it for existing to care much for what it was doing musically.

The one near-redeeming moment is the fact that the Trader Joe’s section at the end of the song does a fun parody of “Hunger Strike” by grunge supergroup Temple of the Dog. Other than that, 2012 is aggressively dull and seems to almost revel in being the most unnecessary release of 2016.