4 out of 5

Label: Onion Records

Produced by: Antony Hegarty, Stiffs, Inc.

In theory, I liked punk when I was a teen, but countless punk comps (generally 30+ tracks priced super cheap…) would find me drifting toward some groups that weren’t as typically punky as yer bigger names of the time, whether that was NOFX, Blink-182 proxies, or the million and one bratty ska-touched punkers that were popping up in the 90s; I’d fall in love with someone like The Marshes (whose Dag Nasty connection I’d later discover…) and play it relentlessly for couldn’t-care-less friends. I heard Stiffs, Inc – a “goth” punk band – through an atypical source: an American Records freebie comp that came with a video game (Comix Zone for Sega, y’all; check my bonafides), and experienced much the same. Which was nuts to me, because I thought, for sure, with their breezy riffage and singalong vocal style, that this would be in the wheelhouse of, say, Lookout Records fans, but my RIYL playthroughs didn’t seem to create any new Stiffs followers.

The years have passed; this is still an awesome album. I’d still cite Lookout as a reference – groups on that label seemed to have a ‘cleaner’ guitar sound and a more organic drum sound than other here-and-then-gone three chorders from the time (and I’m certainly only making that up from the small handful of Lookout acts I listen/listened to) – but wiki would more intelligently tell you about 70s English punk as a touchpoint. Regardless of my apparently limited ear, there’s more going on here than just an affectation for simple songs and catchy hooks: Stiffs’ whole Victorian look (what we would call ‘steampunk’ nowadays) feels like it carries over into restraint in the playing style that gives the songs an appreciable structure and more ebb and flow than typical punk, making it a much more palatable relisten. Singer Whitey Sterling’s sort of vague lyrics don’t necessarily make an impression, but his delivery follows a similar m.o.: precise, clean, and a dreamy, sing-songy pattern of rhyming that was notably far away from the angsty eff-the-man complaints of most genre peers. The icing on this – what helps to guarantee a lasting impression – are the quite unexpected shifts most tracks will take in their final section, switching out an already catchy beat for a strange, though generally killer, breakdown. On occasion this move breaks the disc’s flow, but on the vast majority of tracks it’s a win, and hypes you up for the next track.

Happily, my appreciation of Nix, Nought, Nothing, can now be shared with the random reviewers who are present on any given site where the disc is sold or mentioned: we’re agreed it’s a classic, and that any collection is better off with this disc as part of it.