Off With Their Heads/No Friends Split 6″ (No Idea Records, 2010)

by Thomas Harding on Feb 19^th, 2011

Off with their Heads/No Friends Split 6″

No Idea Records
2010

Side A
Off With Their Heads – “Fields of Darkness” (Pegboy cover)

Side B
No Friends – “Another Wrong” (Dag Nasty cover)

I have always loved tribute records. Land of Greed… World of Need, a tribute to Embrace never leaves rotation on my stereo, and I think I’m one of the few people on earth that thought the Sublime Tribute was any good. So I jump at records that pay homage to bands I love. So when Minneapolis, Minn.’s Off With Their heads rolled through town last week, I made sure to jump on their split with Lemuria from Vinyl Collective’s Under the Influence series. Unfortunately, no copies were available, so I grabbed the next best thing, their split with Orlando, Florida and Richmond, Virginia’s No Friends. On the album from No Idea records, No Friends cover Dag Nasty’s “Another Wrong” and Off With Their Heads do a rendition of Pegboy’s “Fields of Darkness.” Had it not been for the Dag Nasty cover, I probably would have passed this over, as I am unfamiliar with Pegboy. Compared to the original song, the Off With their Head’s side is pretty straight forward, and really the only thing to set it apart from the original is vocalist Ryan Young’s distinctive growl.

On the flip-side we have hardcore band No Friends doing their version of some Can I Say-era Dag Nasty. No Friends put more of their own spin on the song but I feel like it loses something. Part of the fun of the Off With Their Heads side is that the influence of Pegboy is not as obvious as the influence of Dag Nasty is on No Friends. This makes “Another Wrong” indistinct from the rest of the band’s catalog. Furthermore, part of the appeal of Dag Nasty for me has always been the clean leads over the buzzing rhythm guitar. I also find the vocals a bit too aggressive for the song. Perhaps its because I do not really associate Dag Nasty with the emotion of anger and more that of frustration. It just doesn’t work for me like I had hoped it would. That’s not to say the No Friends track is unlistenable, but on certain levels it doesn’t work for me. Maybe it will for some other guy.

So while the side I was most looking forward to did not really live up to expectations, the Off With Their Heads side has turned me on to band that I have been over looking for quite some time. The packaging is pretty standard and has parodies of the covers of the “Fields of Darkness” single and Can I Say where the heads have all been replaced with those of cats. which is true to form for an Off With Their Heads release; and, true to form for No Idea records, the record comes on some of the ugliest colors of vinyl known to man.

Reviewer: Thomas Harding