While their debut LP from 2023 had the character of a colorful grab bag of different styles and flavors, the sophomore album of this Cincinnati, Ohio group featuring members of, among others, The Drin, The Serfs, Vacation and Crime Of Passing, comes across as a good bit more homogenous with the common thread here being a comparatively sleazy, hard-rockin’ garage punk sound occasionally bordering on dungeon- and motörpunk territory with strong similarities to the likes of Cement Shoes, Golden Pelicans, Cheap Heat, Pïss Bäth as well as AUS/NZ groups like Hög, Polute, Split System or maybe Alien Nosejob’s sleaze rock record Stained Glass a while back, yet there is still plenty of nuance and variety crammed into in these tunes regardless. Currency has a strong feel of classic Saints, Radio Birdman and Scientists while Afraid of Guns melds propulsive power pop harmonies with psychedelic undercurrents and textures. Speaking of which, the band members’ connections to The Drin and The Serfs become quite obvious for a change in the spaced-out, kraut-ish Gears Never Dry. Quite Nice and to a lesser extent, What Have I Done radiate a hazy, cowpunk-ish heartland rock vibe, Nie Wrócimy has a bit of an MX-80-esque proto-/art punk bent to itself and i totally shouldn’t fail to point out the four bonus tracks of the digital edition, among which the record’s most catchy, power pop-ish tunes Error, Flowers and the Wire-esque Ffion deserve special mention.
The newest release on the consistently brilliant Total Punk sublabel Mind Meld is yet another stunning achievement from the outer fringes of the garage punk-related universe created by a Sydney group featuring members of Shrapnel, Gee Tee and Satanic Togas among their ranks, although of these, Shrapnel are the obvious comparison for these elegant and accomplished compositions of timeless, jangly-ass power pop and art rock with vague and fleeting echoes of The Soft Boys, The Bevis Frond and Television among many others, in addition to a diverse cluster more recent shit by the likes of Treehouse, Honey Radar, Good Flying Birds, Kitchen’s Floor, Chronophage or Violent Change.
Following a short fuck-around phase as evidenced by their first EP, New Jersey group Nylon really kicked into gear with their tracks on a split EP with Operants and another strong, subsequent 2-track single. On their newest one, they once again raise the bar for their own mix of egg-ish garage punk and angular post punk which never before came across this confident and effortless, calling to mind a bunch of similar agents of chaos such as early Skull Cult, Pressure Pin, Trashdog, Checkpoint, Titanium Exposé, Reality Group, Patti, Big Bopper and Belly Jelly.
More quite old-timey, fuzzy (garage-) punk goodness by a group from Oslo, Norway that sorta plays out like an incarnation of early Sick Thoughts or Bart and the Brats suffering from a total amnesia regarding anything that’s been happening after, like, ’82. And this shit works, simply because the underlying tunes never drop the ball even once and the excellent quasi-cover of Devo’s Mongoloid just feels perfectly logical and natural to be included here.
This Thunder Bay, Ontario group delivers a thoroughly convincing debut EP here on which they mix a substantial garage vibe with postcore of the old Drive Like Jehu-/Hot Snakes school to an explosive result that most of all reminds me of old Atlanta greats Wymyns Prysyn in addition to a couple of more or less related phenomena from recent years á la Rifle, Dollhouse, The Hammer Party, Mutual Jerk, Postman, Nag and Kids Of Zoo.
The Leipzig scene strikes again with this neat little tape of timeless shambolic DIY punk that seems to channel the rough aesthetics of S.Y.P.H., yet successfully transfers them into a contemporary context adjacent to stuff like Narkose, Maske, Die Verlierer or very early Pisse. Also, there’s a quite unlikely undercurrent of The Gun Club here running through tracks such as Relax Like A Puu and especially Copy Man with its unexpected slide guitar stylings.
Here’s a new short-playing dose of madness from that Lansing, Michigan one-man-band and who would have guessed – it’s yet another delightful attack of chaotic synth-/electro-/sample punk so blown-out within an inch of its life it leaves me wonderin’ whether i’m hearing a guitar or just a mutilated synth in the opening track. Thus, high quality new fodder for friends of other disconcerting noises á la Beef, ISS, Heavy Metal, Klint, Spyroids, R. Clown or Kerozine.
The artwork appears to not very subtly hint at a dungeon-related thing and this almost sounds plausible with the riff-heavy opening track, though after that, the spanish group’s newest EP settles into that familiar sound of dreamy, egg-ish noise pop and synthpunk we all know and love them for, albeit with a few unexpected nuances like the aformentioned opening, occasional emo-ish sprinkles, some hints at straightforward, classic indie rock and moments channeling some C86-by-way-of-early shoegaze kind of aesthetic in El Valle De La Muerte and the closing track Sesos En Bandeja.
Okay, so here we have yet another Berlin based post punk group, though i’m just gonna say these folks sound at best 50% berlin-like and the other fifty lean towards a charmingly antiquated sounding style i’m associating most with the early 2010s Stuttgart scene and the early Karies records in particular, as well as their Ruhr valley contemporaries Nuage and – somewhat more recently, just maybe – Chemnitz’s own L’appel Du Vide.
