Damn if The Spits don't make their brand of musical retardation all seem so easy: Like all their releases before them, they've stocked School's Out with 10 instant classics, with each and every song in its place and every single one of 'em indispensable. Don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned, that's pretty rad and in the pantheon of all that was originally cool about first wave American punk (and why it still remains as essential as it did from day one), with this, their best release to date, The Spits have earned themselves a much deserved seat at the table alongside groups like the Ramones, Bullet-era Misfits, Crime, The Eat, et all...

Spiced up with some Are We Not Men-era Devo and maybe a little dash o' Chrome thrown in too (bassist Erin Wood's SPIDER side project showing through), School's Out is the accumulated, fetid stew of body fluids left behind in the mattress room of Plato's Retreat where some crotch crickets got introduced to the tableau and ultimately made the place really start to jump, and on these ten songs they're jumping every which way.... School's Out is so enjoyably diseased, your pie hole will stretch and bear pearly whiteness ear-to-ear. School's Out's a proverbial flea circus celebration of nihilism, wanton drunkenness, incorrigibility, juvenile delinquency, teen sex, vandalism, petty crime, hooliganism, self-mutilation and aliens-which is just about everything in a not-so-perfect world punk rock is supposed to be.

See, The Spits are so much of THAT era, but not a revivalist act by any stretch. For one thing, they're FRESH and newfangled without the vagaries of modernization or plasticized homage that'd otherwise give 'em a whiff of falsehood and illegitimacy. The Spits actually manage the not so easy trick of making it all their own and consequently they've pretty much single-handedly revitalized this thing of ours and paved the way for a completely new generation of maladjusted squids giving 'em the go-ahead to squirt ink anew. And if all that seems rife with over-statement, then stop and consider the long line of bands who site The Spits as a major influence (Black Lips, King Khan....) or the laundry list of new-jack labels currently du jour (HoZac, Woodsist-hell, even the newly reconstituted Siltbreeze to name several) in one form or another shine a little brighter because of them.

-Flinty