The Nico Missile is another one of Ricky Hell's many pastimes. There are few surprises here, instead you get more of his familiar trademark of quality. If you know some of his other Bands like Fascinating or Ricky Hell And The Voidboys you kinda know what to expect: Garage-edged Fuzz Punk and Noise Pop somewhere in the Neighbohood of No Age, Terry Malts, Tiger! Shit! Tiger! TIger! or Male Bonding. What more could you want?
Although other british bands of their genre enjoyed much more media attention than london art-/post punks Italia 90 have in recent years, few other bands, in my humble opinion, embody so much of the soul and rebellious no-bullshit DIY attitude of the scene, a bitter and emotional indictment of a society collectively shrugging off its own guilty conscience. It's about time this Band gets noticed a lot more. On their third EP -just like on its predecessors - i hear strong echoes of old post punk greats: Crisis, Membranes, Swell Maps and early Mekons for example. Simultaneously Italia 90 keep expanding on their sonic spectrum. Usually when punks go slow, this tends to result in a horrible trainwreck. But surprisingly, the slowest, most subdued moments are the clear highlights of this record. In Open Veins, the gentle performance collides with the disillusioned and angry charges delivered by its lyrics. This combination reminds me a bit of recent Protomartyr, while the closing track Against The Wall has a subtle psychedelic note in common with Wire's Chairs Missing album.
Missouri punks Fried e/M create some beautifully rough and oldschool noise, somewhere on the fringes of hardcore-, garage- and KBD punk. Their sound specifically reminds me of Noxious Fumes, but a more recent Band like Launcher might also be a good enough comparison.
What the title promises, this record delivers. Danceable shit? You bet! Anarchist messages? Tons of those get proclaimed here in such density you really can't miss or ignore them. Musically, this is not exactly something you'd associate with anarcho punk, although this stuff clearly has much of the same spirit. This is infectouis post punk with a punchy postcore edge which, despite its dancefloor effectiveness, also succeeds in the noise department, showing no fear of waking up the neighbors. This, and their explicitly political lyrics seperate them quite a bit from last decade's short-lived dance punk explosion. Instead of New York cool you get an appropriately blunt and distinctly british sense of urgency, even as they seem to share many of the same influences. Gang Of Four, obviously, as well as Minutemen, mid- to late eighties Membranes, The Pop Group. And in the present, comparing them to Tics, Pill, Slumb Party, Special Interest or UZS wouldn't be too far off.
With their first long playing cassette, Paz SS from Valencia, Spain deliver a good batch of plain old garage- and fuzz punk done right, eqipped with the necessary propulsion by a thoroughly competent band. You might compare them to the straght garage punk of bands like Ex Cult, Sauna Youth or Foul Swoops, the energetic Fuzzcore of Ill Globo and occasionally there's even a faint shimmer of Wipers.
The old 12XU spotify playlist is long dead, so now i'm undertaking a second, more serious attempt with songs roughly divided into three playlists of new shit, older crap and classic diarrhea. Since the spotify catalogue appears to improve over time - more than half the songs i imported were available this time, hurrah! - this might even start to make a bit of sense.
To start with, this is based on an automatic import of 12XU Radio's playlists, which i then tried to purge of false matches. So please be prepared for a few duplicates, redundancies and other scary stuff i might have missed.
A somewhat quirky animal, this debut album by Minneapolis' Basement Boys. Starts out by radiating a kind of post punk vibe similar to Plax or The Cowboy, then increasingly skews toward garage punk, augumented by a small dose of noise and some beach goth melancholy, at times reminding me of stuff like Co Sonn, Ex-Cult, Shark Toys or early Wavves.
On their debut LP, Barcelona's Sandré deliver a roundhouse kick of unerring precision, a sound located somewhere on the fringes of post punk, post- and noisecore; always keeping the delicate balance between a raw, immediate impact and self-confident ambition. Speculating about possible influences, i'm thinking of a wide array of bands like Downtown Boys, early Die! Die! Die!, Les Savy Fav - but i'm also feeling a very distinct vibe akin to other spanish acts of recent years, especially the likes of Juventud Juché, Betunizer and Cubano Vale.