A fun, smart high-energy blow of garage-infused hardcore punk delivered by a group that might or mightn’t be from Long Beach, California, holding a perfect balance between dumb straight-ahead oldschool energy and the various quirks and eccentricities of more recent hardcore phenomena, which sorta locates them on the genre map somewhere in the excellent company of other contemporary troublemakers such as Mystic Inane, Launcher, Fried E/M, Modern Needs or Liquid Assets.
Such a neat cloudy puddle of innocent and filthy joy, this set of lo-fi demo recordings by some philadelphia garage group kicking up a fuzz of the most oldschool and primitive kind. Kinda like the early works of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and UV Race augumented with that more primal energy akin to earlier acts such as Gories, Oblivians, Reatards.
Ooohkay… still recovering from yesterday's "deutschpunk" ambush, let's now focus on our foreign language / world music department again. "Wöd" appears to be austrian for "World", as well as "pretty fuckin' rad", at least that's what the internet says and the internet is always right. So yeah, this shit's pretty wöd, as you'd expect from the successor to the Vienna garage punk group's kinda leiwand 2020 EP.
Their recent Skeleton/Runaway digital single was some quality shit already and a huge step up from previous releases. With their newest EP, the Austin, Texas group keeps the good stuff coming, clear highlights this time being the perfect power pop one-two punch The Amazing Super Ultra Spiderman & Shit Me Out but the rest is great fun too, coming across a bit like an amazing super ultra holy trinity of Ausmuteants, S.B.F. and Set-Top Box.
A highly appetizing first taste that is, the debut EP of this London group playing a somewhat hard to pin down, adequately rough-edged yet also kinda catchy style that's like 60% garage punk and 40% postcore, overall reminding me of a rather diverse cluster of groups among which are the likes of The Abandos, Obits, Golden Pelicans, Mass Lines, Dumb Punts and Ascot Stabber.
I gotta say i'm more than delighted with the versatile and smart and weird ways in which garage punk has evolved over more recent years but, you know, sometimes i'm just craving for something more oldschool and primal. Detroit duo 208's new cassette on Painters Tapes does a fabulous job scratching that particular itch, containing the raw, primitive, sweaty and drunken blues variety of garage punk, the kind you need to have a soul but no brain to appreciate. Yeah, i'm aware that the soul is a purely religious construct that has zero evidence going for it in real life. So let's say instead that you need a broken soulful brain to appreciate it, or something like that, okay?. The fidelity of this is just perfect, the kind of production where heavy clipping both digital and analog is a feature, not a bug - a fuzz-saw mangler of jams which might evoke comparisons to mostly older shit like Oblivians, Gories, Pussy Galore, Feedtime, Reatards and whatnot.
The spanish garage scene is full of gold lately (and speaking of el diablo… have you all heard that fabulous Hogar LP yet?) - latest piece of evidence is this nice little EP by a group from… Barcelona, i guess? At least that's one of the few words i'm able to recognise in their lyrics. They're playing a fun variety of garage punk that mostly alternates between straight and stupid '77-ish simplicity and a more contemporary, angular groove á la Uranium Club, Pinch Points.
For his second 7" on Goodbye Boozy Records, Cal Donald aka Liquid Face increases both the energy- and distortion levels considerably, making his special sauce of garage-/synth-/post punk come across kinda like a weird crossbreed between Powerplant, Mononegatives and the noise punk of Brandy.
My favorite british punk group of the moment has yet to write a song that isn't as infectious as fuck and their most recent digital (?) single release delivers another two of their strongest so far and once again will effortlessly conquer the hearts of every connoiseur of Television Personalities-influenced strumming á la Suburban Homes, Neutrals or Freak Genes.
Zoids keep things classy and weird on their newest tape, which will soon be physically available via Goodbye Boozy. Still clearly operating on the outer fringes of crude and dissonant garage-/post punk and highly demented space rock, this group or person of mysterious whereabouts remains a charmingly broken machine that doesn't need any fixing.
