Ruin Jonny's Bar Mitzvah

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Me First and the Gimme Gimmes

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This is a live recording by the world's greatest cover band. The Gimmes are a collection of super-talented musicians posing as a couple of shmucks, and they rock. The whole performance is hysterical in Me First fashion, you will not stop laughing as well as enjoying many new offerings from these punk-rock kings. Do yourself a huge favor and by all available releases from the Gimmes. Do yourself an even bigger favor and by them direct from Fat Wreck Chords and save yourself a few bucks.

By the way Fat Mike may not be a genius but his political sense is deadly accurate.

I'm a fan of Me First, and I really loved their previous album "Take a Break." So I was excited when I learned they were coming out with a new album, and went out and got it right away.

Okay, after listening to this album once, the first thing I did was rip the tracks to my computer, edit out everything that wasn't music, and re-burn it. Like some other live performance CDs, they left in whatever the band said between songs. And the talking adds NOTHING to any of the songs, nor is it even remotely entertaining. Since I didn't feel like having to hit the FWD button after every single song to skip the last 45 seconds, I edited this stuff out, and will probably never listen to the original CD again.

Gimmicks aside, the music just isn't as good as "Take a Break." Without the worthless talking, there is only about 28 minutes of music on this disk, and it just isn't as catchy or interesting as their previous albums. My favorite song on this was probably "Come Sail Away," but it couldn't hold a flame to "Where do Broken Hearts Go," "Danny's Song," "End of the Road," or "Science Fiction Double Feature" on their previous albums. Their previous covers always seemed to add an original touch to the songs they cover, like the ukelele in "I Believe I Can Fly" or just perfectly amped-up melodies in "Wild World." On this album, I didn't get any sense of that, and they basically just seemed like the original songs played a little faster and shouted in places.

My advice: Buy "Take a Break" and leave this one shelved. Sorry Me First, but this was a real let down as an album. And if you are still going to buy this album, keep in mind that it IS a live recording, even though it isn't really being billed as one.