Verspannungskassette #96 (C-60)
Tracklist
Outdoorsmen When They Bury You Down
Jumbo XL The Flag
Power Pants PP10
Balloon Thief Cease & Desist
Tvo Burning
Glueman Born Loser
Cruelster Stalked
Leche Miracle Whip-It
Piss Wizard If I Should Fall From Grace With God
Jean Mignon Won’t Put Him Down
Havana Syndrome Dirt Machine
Annual Report Bitch on a Leash
Irreversible Defacement Track One
Cutup Black Hole
Rosary Crucifetish
User Dodge Technique
The Karens You Stole My Mail
Smash Your Face Yuki No Kakera
Tracklist
Eddy Current Suppression Ring Oh No
Yuasa-Exide Subvocalization
The Wind-Ups Keep Away
Powerplant Empty Telephone
Big & Heavy Grift
Useless Eaters Ego Shell
Glas Nost Thief
Fatherfigures Church Burned Down
Dissenting Voices Dave
Nul Quan Ja Hagi Passat
Sympos Welcome to Ballybricken
Dark Thoughts So Alone
Screaming Target Screaming Target
Xanny Stars Symmetry
Outtacontroller Hold It Out
Jug & The Bugs – Ground You
Jug & The Bugs of Vernon Township, New Jersey have been messing about for a good while by now, along the way having dumped tons of stuff on Bandcamp in varying flavors of garage punk and even the occasional bit of abstract no-wave-ish noise, all of it ranging from rather traditional and oldschool to kinda artsy and elaborate. Their newest LP though feels like the exact moment in which the group has found something of their own voice, transcending their fast-and-loose garage punk roots. And indeed these guys aren’t fucking around here in a tightly focused group effort, some comparatively polished sounding production values putting these elegantly crafted little art punk dramas in just the right light. Right out of the gate the opening track Your World radiates a distinct vibe á la Wire-meets-Dead Boys. It’s Wire in particular though who will come to mind more than just once over the course of this record, in addition to such powerhouses of that whole garage-/art-/post punk axis like Marbled Eye, Ex Cult, fairly recent Institute, Tyvek, Shark Toys, Andy Human & The Reptoids, R.M.F.C., Motorbike… and on top of that, in the second half there’s some unmistakable power pop bent taking hold in tunes like Delivery and Away Today. So yeah this is quality shit no doubt.
Album-Stream →Cruelster – Make Them Wonder Why
New shit from that Cleveland, Ohio axis of smartypants post- and garage punk centering around Cruelster, Perverts Again, Knowso and The Carp, the linking element to each of them being the distinctive “sprechgesang” vocals of Nathan Ward. Now Cruelster have always been the most fun and straightforward rockin’-out entity of the bunch and their newest LP is no exception to that, which isn’t to say by any means that their compact little art punk/-core bursts were any less ambitious, inventive and elaborate… only that Cruelster appears to focus the most on embedding and quantizing (yeah, quantization is a word that springs to mind a lot with any of these groups) their angular zig-zagging hooks into a reasonably friction-less garage- and hardcore punk framework. Fairly smart shit that only sounds kinda dumb – the best of two opposing worlds!
Album-Stream →TVO – All Aboard Choo Choo Fuck You
Philadelphia’s TVO already stuck out from the pack on their previous EPs with a make of post- and garage punk that seemed to take uncommon inspiration from a number of groups of the proto-grunge and proto-noise rock era with clear echoes of U-Men, Scientists, early Mudhoney, Feedtime, Fungus Brains, Scratch Acid and X (AUS), to name just a few of the usual suspects. Their new full length debut still has all of the same goodness on board while also gradually steering their ship into a somewhat unexpected direction by drenching their songs in a generous helping somewhat sleazed-up, bluesy rock’n’roll and what can i say, without exception they deliver the songs and tight-ass performances here to make the shit stick and indeed these tunes are a marked jump forward for the group, showcasing an exceptionally tight grip on their always dead-on songwriting skills.
Album-Stream →The Wind-Ups – Confection
Always a welcome kickass affair, new material by Jake Sprecher of Terry Malts fame and his current band/project The Wind-Ups, which went off with a bang in 2021 with the incredible Try Not To Think LP and has since then not changed a whole lot but also never disappointed – a constant, reliable level of quality that persists through their third longplayer too, still making it hard not to be instantly enchanted by their timeless garage rock and bubblegum pop compositions taking on a delightfully rustic and fuzz-laden sonic form of blown-out noise pop and garage punk.
Album-Stream →Leche – Miracle Whip-It
Digital Hotdogs brings us the newest crime of Austin, Texas cowpunk wrecking crew Leche which, way more than any of their previous works, reminds me quite a bit of another Digital Hotdogs mainstay, Trashdog, not so much in terms of their actual sound and more in their hyperactive, disjointed anything-goes approach dismissing or subverting any established rules and conceptions of genre, structure, continuity, reality itself… so yeah this is yet another glorious genre-bending, fragmented mess that can feel like a bit too much of everything at times. But once you filtered your way thruough all the stuff, there’s a really neat single LP hidden in this seemingly indiscriminate dump of a double LP’s worth of material. This is maybe not so much (Trashdog’s) Weezer’s Blue Album and more (Leche’s) The Beatles’ White Album – a bit too long, kinda messy, in seemingly random sequence and it shouldn’t be judged by its weakest parts.
Album-Stream →Cutup – The Future Leaks Out
This Cleveland, Ohio group’s second EP strikes all the right chords with me after ther 2023 Debut already made a strong first impression, but this new one is another level of insanity altogether for their sonic assault of quirky & rowdy hardcore- and, occasionally, post punk wrapped in a thick layer of grimy Flipper-esque noise texture that calls to mind pretty much any modern-day genre classic by the likes of Stinkhole, Launcher, Mystic Inane, early Soupcans, Dollhouse, Lumpy and the Dumpers, Vulture Shit and Big Bopper, just to name a couple of the more obvlous ones.
Album-Stream →Apéro – Cold Drinks, Cool Snacks
This Hamburg group creates fun, short and snappy little garage-/synth-/eggpunk tunes that don’t stray too far from widely established genre formulas but gets everything about that shit so fuckin’ right as if they’ve been at it for ages, cycling through a decent variety of workmanlike genre exercises that you feel pretty sure you’ve heard somewhere before but can’t escape their catchy spells anyway, so i’m gonna say friends of shit like Beer, Media Puzzle, Winky Frown, Prison Affair, Set Top Box, Ghoulies or Goblin Daycare can’t go wrong with this shit either.
Album-Stream →Jean Mignon – Jean Mignon
Just as its two predecessors, the newest EP by New York’s Jean Mignon is yet another delightful attack of catchy and mean garage-/proto punk goodness in which a good deal of primitive ’77 energy is getting poured into a rather timeless sound of blown-out garage punk insanity which, in tunes like Won’t Put Him Down, is sure gonna strike a chord with admirers of, say, Kid Chrome or that recent Elvis 2 LP.
Album-Stream →