5 out of 5

Label: Asian Man Records

Produced by: Robert Berry

I always felt like I was cheating by loving this record so much, because mu330 was a ska band, and then they were sort of ska/rock, and then this disc… well, this is very much rock.  There are great horn bits, and a bit of off-tempo strum, but lissen to them pummeling drums on opener Vow Vow, or singer Dan Potthast’s excellent rage on Stick It, and there’s no denying what the foremost genre here was.  But it wasn’t like I was new to mu330 with this disc, and Press and Chumps (and, to a lesser extent, Crab Rangoon) still got, and get, regular time in my player, with Chumps a notable masterpiece in its own way as well, but that album very much bears the hallmarks of the punk/ska era, whereas I pushed this self-titled disc on avowed non-ska-sters to convince them of mu330’s legit credibility.

Potthast’s fantastically him blend of confessional, confrontational, poetic, and silly lyricism is boiled and served in bite-sized 2-minute chunks; each track kicks off with an instantly catchy riff and builds off of it.  And though guitar, bass and drums make their mark, our excellent horn section is still lushly adding layers – not an afterthought – giving the disc an actual extra dimension, and not just, like, horns ’cause ska.

We rip through 14 tracks at an insane rate, and where this disc gains an edge over all of mu330’s previous releases is that none of the songs feel like jokes exactly; not that mu330 ever functioned as that kind of band after Press, but there were definitely songs on each release that, y’know, were a bit goofier.  Self-titled isn’t lacking in mirth per se, but as with the laser-focus runtime, Dan and the band felt like they grew up a bit when scripting these tracks, resulting in something I can unashamedly sing along to from start to finish…

It was always interesting to me that mu330 (and Dan’s future projects) went in a much more squarely ska direction after this, but I also sort of respect that they made their perfect rock album, and then moved on.