Shop Regulars - Shop Regulars

I had a bit of a hard time warm­ing up to more re­cent en­tries in that in­creasin­ly scrap­py and loose sound­ing line of tapes of this Port­land group front­ed by Matt Ra­do­se­vich of Hon­ey Buck­et fame. Now on their first acu­tal LP though, they mean busi­ness it ap­pears and in­deed they come across as fo­cused as they haven't sound­ed for quite some time. Less is more seems to be the max­im here with what ba­si­cal­ly amounts to five pro­longed, equal­ly mo­not­o­nous and play­ful one-chord won­ders (well, al­most), in which tex­ture and rhythm do most of the heavy lift­ing in­stead. Re­al­ly, this is the kind of min­i­mal­ism that makes ear­ly The Fall sound like pro­gres­sive rock in com­par­i­son. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, for a record mak­ing so few con­ces­sion to pre­con­ceived no­tions of what a "song" goes like, the whole thing is ra­di­at­ing in­fec­tious­ly up­beat vibes through­out in what is prob­a­bly gonna be the most joy­ous piece of ab­stract art punk you'll hear this sum­mer.