4 out of 5

Label: self-released

Produced by: Shane Hochstetler

Pardon the crassness up front, but if I explained IfIHadAHiFi in one word, it would be: shitkickers. I mean this positively, of course; lovingly, even. From the beginning, the group was kinda building up and destroying their own sound, formalizing more and more around something like “rock” or “punk,” but titling their albums traveling along this axis “No More Music” and “Fame By Proxy.” They very purposefully couldn’t get out of their own way, when I feel like the spike in some louder acts’ popularity during the early 00s could’ve embraced HiFi’s brutal nonsense.

Not to suggest embrasure was necessarily the goal, but there’s a clear fitfulness guiding the band’s evolution during their pretty consistent release schedule for about a decade, and then… silence. Or at least from a release perspective. Touring may have been happening, and according to Discogs, one HiFier is involved with RedLetterMedia – which I’m sure is time consuming – and who knows what else that could fall under the “life” bucket, but the group had iterated from indie labels to self-releasing, and had really pushed their sound the entire time; I would have been content with their legacy at that point.

But seven years later, we get the fittingly titled “We’re Never Going Home,” which proves true in a couple ways: shitkickers pure and true, the delay has not dimmed the HiFi sound of poppy / punky beats exploding into noisy chaos, with occasional oddball samples breaking up the sung / shouted vocals. However, the pause also has not progressed things, really, and this album is the first where I’d say the group is kind of just riffing on themselves. So that album title has the snotty, can’t-get-rid-of-me vibes befitting iconoclasts like IfIHadAHiFi, but it also has a kind of somber undertone: they just want to stay where they are. I think that persists through the lyrics, which have the observational nature of middle age, having seen the cycle before you repeat enough times – though this is shot through with the group’s generally enjoyable wit and clever smart / stupid juxtapositions. And it persists in the music, which follows the previous albums’ trend toward more linear rock, but absolutely with enough juice to remind you who you’re listening to.

In short, there’s no reason to not like this if you’re a HiFi fan. It hits hard, and with Shane Hochstetler at the boards, it sounds hard. I’d even rate the “stuck in place” quality as something of a positive, as there’s a bit of weight to it as a result. Of course, the group’s fitful nature doesn’t match with that, unfortunately preventing any single song from really standing out as an all-time sequel, but I’d rather hear a band fully settling into their sound upon a return, as opposed to trying to capture past magic or do something completely left field.