When I received this CD, I promptly exclaimed, "What the heck it this?" Well, it's Dead Fucking Last's new album, entitled Grateful. The reason for the aforementioned exclamation was that the packaging was quite unorthodox. In scrawled printing, there were production, recording and mastering credits, a web site address, and four different band rosters. To this day, I still don't know who's in DFL. Yet, still, the most unusual thing is the CD itself. There is one track, 26 minutes long, with 17 songs on it, therefore; because there are no vacant spaces between songs, it sometimes is hard to tell when a song starts or ends.
However, most of these quirky packaging faults are made up for when the music starts. Grateful has 17 songs in 26 minutes, which works out to an approximate average of a minute and a half a song (my math isn't very good). Although the songs are short, they sure are sweet. A few of the highlights are first song "We Are The Dead", "The Grateful Song", "Live 4 Today" and "It's All (In Your Head)". I wish I had a CD player that programmed by minutes and seconds instead of tracks.
DFL is an Epitaph band. This should immediately send out a signal to record buyers that says: HARDCORE PUNK. And nobody does it better than the part of Epitaph that is Dead Fucking Last. This is a party album, something to get the adrenaline flowing, something that sounds like old Beastie Boys before they turned rap. Although this album may seem sloppily done, (example: someone laughs at the end of a song, then someone whispers, "Shhh! That's a keeper!") it is a superb effort from a band whose main previous credit was that their last album was produced by Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys.
