Search - Fear :: Record

The most amazing thing about Fear's best-known punk anthem, "Let's Have a War," was that it came out nine years before the Persian Gulf War. A war, the hardcore Southern California quartet sarcastically predicted in 1982, would "jack up the Dow Jones" and benefit from selling "the rights to the networks." Lee Ving sings with so much shrieking, cigarette-enhanced intensity that it's sometimes easy to miss the band's sense of humor. "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones" contains the best punk saxophone since X-Ray Spex, and the 44-second CD bonus track "(Expletive) Christmas" is hilarious anti-everything punk nihilism. Steve Knopper