Oh, did my heart leap for joy when I saw this one in my review pile! The Fartz (heh heh, I said fart), are raunchy, thrashed-out hardcore punk mofos from Seattle back in the day. I mean way back in the day, like 1982. Some people might remember The Fartz because Duff McKagan (best known for being a member of Guns N’ Roses) played drums for them. But you should remember them, or at least know them, because they are what punk is all about: foul-mouthed, trash talking, political, in your face, crusty brats rocking out without the major label deal, the corporate sponsorship, the posh tour bus, and all the other things one associates with punk in this post-Dookie world we live in.

All but one of the tracks on What’s In A Name are actually just re-recordings of songs previously released as Because This World Still Fucking Stinks back in 1998. But thanks to Jack Endino, the Seattle-based sound god, they sound spanky good. You can actually make out the lyrics and hear the guitar and bass lines as separate entities.

I love this album for its absurdist cover of Motorhead’s "Iron Fist". I love this album for lyrics like "Some still pray to their false God to save their fuckin’ souls/God’s not gonna be there when they lay you in the hole." I love this album for giving Al Gore a mohawk on it cover (even though he will never cut quite the same figure as Reagan). There’s not a single song here that’s over three minutes; all 15 tracks were recorded live-to-tape in the studio in fourteen hours straight, and the energy is palpable. So it's definitely not sing-along pop-punk, but it sure makes for good moshing.

Punk is a pretty popular genre these days. Punk bands make money, get commercial radio airplay and go on huge festival tours. As if you need me to tell you, it wasn’t always that way. Long before the Warped Tour, bands like The Fartz trudged through the mud of the underground music scene, and their music is all the more vital for it -- even two decades later.