With Punk Rock now warmly embraced by the mainstream, stiffs,inc. grab the reins and steer the beast back where it belongs away from the shopping malls and chain stores and back into the dark alleyways where it was born.

Their songs rock and swerve madly like a nightmare Hansom cab ride through the same gaslit, cobblestone streets Jack the Ripper prowled. Through the windows, images flash by outside, glimpsed momentarily in the darkness: pale teenage runaways cowering in the doorways, chalk-outlined bodies, Theda Bara smiling coyly in a crumpled black dress, forlorn vagrants huddled around a fire, a black doctor's bag stained with blood. Was that the Downliners Sect, Eater and the Pagans secretly meeting in the shadowy courtyard of the abandoned theater? What is the meaning behind this skullduggery? Where will this fiendish journey take us? Quick, Watson, the needle. This, I fear, this is a two spike problem.

There was a time, not so long ago, when punk rock meant a brain rushing with electrical sparks and mad ideas, not some tribal mosh ritual for baboons in baggy shorts and beefy T's. Fun and energy met deranged inspiration in a head-on collision, and anything could happen. There was no formula, no agenda, no rules. Today we have Nix Nought Nothing.

"I'm quite sane," lies Whitey Sterling on their lunatic's love lament "Mary Pickford." As Sherlock Holmes' violin saws its ghostly, melancholy air over the resounding roar of the song's insistent coda, you know Sterling's brain is rushing with the kind of inspired madness that makes for the purest punk rock `n roll.

stiffs,inc.'s songs aren't phony made-for-MTV anthems of Pepsi Gen-X angst. As they say in "Generation Crap": "My generation means nothing to me...my generation is an empty lifeboat out at sea." stiffs,inc.s' songs speak only for themselves: "Blown Away Baby" is a black-humored tribute to the romance of young suicide; "250624" and "Engineering" are schoolboy chemistry experiments in the tradition of Pink Flag-era Wire; and "Work" is the most stomping, chord-crunchin' piece of dead-end job despair since the Pack's mighty "Working For One Holiday" (Never heard of it? Just take my word for it, my friends).

Among the best here, "Die Mother Die" and "Fear In the Night" move fast and kick you in the guts like Slaughter & the Dogs or the early Damned, yet throb with the kind of evocative images you can only find in old crime and mystery books or the best film noir. Then there's "Chelsea," originally released as a single on their own label. If there's been a better punk rock song written this decade I'd like to know about it. Its hook lays a more devious trap than even Moriarty himself could devise, and Mauser's leaping bass runs at the song's close are pure genius.

stiffs,inc. like their music, have real personality. There are no bland, stolen poses, xeroxes of familiar old blueprints, or dim-bulb, bad boy bravado. They are at once strange, vital, violent, smart, cryptic and absolutely rockin'. Nix Nought Nothing has a timeless, eccentric spirit that blows through the cobwebs of the past and into your future.