Dallax, Texas punks Thyroids have been fucking around with different styles and vibes for quite a few years already but they really started to hit their stride with last year’s excellent EP Toppings and Droppings. Now, for their first full LP, they’ve once again shaken up and diversified their sound considerably, with only traces left of the heavy synth punk leanings of the predecessor. The opening track ABCs of Assimilation delights with a variation on angular post-meets-garage punk shit á la Reality Group, Uranium Club, Exit Group and also quite a bit of Skull Cult – even more so in tunes like Static/Dynamic or The New Poor, which also have a bit of an undeniable Knowso vibe to them. The Loot and Don’t Ask, Dumbass are no-frills borderline-hardcore gut punches. Daily Habits reimagines the group in a somewhat egg-ish guise while Enterview and Suited & Tied have something of a math-y postcore edge, vaguely reminiscent of the likes of Big Bopper, Rolex, Brandy or Mystic Inane. Check Engine Light conjures up some oldschool Useless Eaters or Ex-Cult energy. Cop Out is a hyper-focused and compact garage smasher getting maximum mileage out of an old-fashioned riff and the closing tune !!! Click Now To Claim Your Reward !!! once again goes all-in on the afrementioned Skull Cult and Uranium Club vibes to utterly hypnotic results.
A pretty fucking stunning debut LP from an Alamance, North Carolina duo excelling in a hazy and hypnotic mixture of noise rock, post punk, oldschool indie rock and the darkest alleys of the americana spectrum. The latter tendency often come across like a more vicious and propulsive take on the muddy southern gothic charm of (quite paradoxically) NYC based group Weak Signal but also, at certain points, you may find traces of the blues-y proto-noise rock of Feedtime and Scratch Acid, the swamp rock of eighties Scientists. The overarching melancholy of the whole affair then again reminds me of somewhat indie rock-leaning groups like Australia’s Kitchen’s Floor, Treehouse and earlier stuff of London’s Witching Waves on one hand, the moody, eccentric post punk of acts like Auckland/Berlin-based groups Trust Punks, Dead Finks on the other, with further similarities to the deep abysses of Atlanta’s Uniform, Glittering Insects, Mother’s Milk or the folk-ish Angst- and Meat Puppets-indebted neo-proto-grunge of Bellingham, Washington group Pig Earth and Madison, Wisconsin’s Dharma Dogs. All of that is being rolled expertly into ten all-killer-no-filler widescreen melodramas here with perfect sonic architectures marked by super effective buildups and payoffs.
Excellent garage-leaning horror punk from yet another Minneapolis group. I gotta admit i wasn’t too thrilled at first as directionless is probably the right word to describe the opening track Lobotomized of their first long-playing effort, but thankfully after that, they quickly find their footing with pretty much everything that follows being on a different level altogether as flourishes of eighties early goth- and death rock collide with elements of early west coast punk and hardcore, plus riffs and solos straight out of the ’70s metal and motörpunk playbook in an inventive and tight-as-fuck explosion of highly addictive hooks.
This Minneapolis group sets off some fine little blasts of quite classic-sounding postcore that roughly follows the old blueprints set out by Drive Like Jehu and – even more so – Hot Snakes, subsequently carried over into later punk eras by more recent groups like Wymyns Prysyn and Bloody Gears, though in this particular case i think it especially warrants a mention of shit like Ascot Stabber or Flowers of Evil as the way rougher side of that same coin so to speak, which reigns supreme especially in the second half of this EP. Now that i’m thinking of it, i also hear a bit of Video and early Bad Breeding.
New fodder for dungeon dwellers and other medieval punk scum. Sword Breaker of Utrecht, Netherlands made a strong impression with their Demo in 2022 and their full-length debut now delivers more of that same kind of headsplitting fun which can easily be categorized as “Poison Ruïn and their ripple effects”, although that doesn’t mean that their tunes won’t deliver some exquisite thrills in their own right, approaching the microgenre from a way rougher and simpler angle (despite an ever-so-slightly cleaner production aesthetic) which feels way more ’70s hard rock- than ’80s heavy metal-inspired while also leaning harder into classic Oi!- and garage territory with addidional traces of Wipers and subtle touches of british psychedelia.
