Metdog's fourth extended play is yet another treasure trove of playful and easygoing garage punk… let's not talk about eggs again here. Admirers of R.M.F.C., Research Reactor Corp. or Satanic Togas will aprove of this, just as i'm gonna make an exception here and give my full approval for the use of auto-tune or vocoder or whatever that shit in the closing track is… fucking art, i guess.
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Pinch Points are now joining the Exploding In Sound roster, eh? Not the most obvious choice i'd say but who cares… as long as they're gonna stay as razor sharp as on their latest 7", once again coming across like a more straightforward Reality Group or a no-bullshit variant of Uranium Club.
Last year's Health EP was some quality shit already but their newest release is just so ridiculously appealing i wasn't at all prepared for that kind of mayhem. This trio is from Nashville and i suspect that Connor and Sean are the very same dudes best known as Skull Cult otherwise - not a fuckin' clue who Cam is. Oh, and there's one more thing: Being in charge of mixing and mastering, none other than Erik Nervous left his own trademark beer stains all over this cassette whose sound is just as wild and eclectic as consistently catchy. Some echoey garage surf twang? Spaced out psychedelic freakouts? Wire & Mission of Burma vibin' on Benzos? You name it! And hovering even a notch above all that shit, there's the downright perfect 70s power pop-meets-80s hair metal masterpiece Be With You, a knockout punch of the most pleasant kind.
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Um… what meaningful thing is there left to say about a new Alien Nosejob record at this point? They kinda come in two shapes: The grab bag style ones where Mr. Robertson branches out in every direction possible and the hyperfocussed monoculture ones where he doubles down on a single genre - like his hardcore 7"s for example or that synth pop/eurotrash 12" maxi a while ago. Well, this one's another grab bag record and apart from that, it's just the plain old usual awesomeness we've all come to expect from this dude who seems utterly unable to write a dull tune.
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I've been way late to the party when it comes to noticing this Perth group but since i first did, they just kept outdoing themselves with every new release, their latest LP easily quailfying as a top-tier bucket of fun for the discerning garage punk connoisseur and especially for admirers of Uranium Club, Pinch Points, Dumb or Vintage Crop.
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Garage punk from Spain that hits all the right spots dead-on and conveys exactly that kind of explosive momentum of a band hungry to play - the kind of vibe that's been a bit scarce recently, owing to obvious circumstances. To me, their sound calls to mind bits and pieces of Dadar, Sauna Youth, Ex-Cult, Constant Mongrel, Jackson Reid Briggs or Pedigree while also revealing a strong post punk vibe at times, kinda like Berlin groups such as Pigeon, Diät, Pretty Hurts crossbred with the melancholic moods of Red Dons, Telecult or Nightwatchers.
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Yay! New shit by that person or group who might or might not be based in Hicksville, NY and whose 2020 garage-/post-/eggpunk borderline-masterpiece Happyhappy made me exactly that. So now we get a new short playing Hi-Fi experience as well as some other, slightly less short and ever-so-slightly less Hi-Fi thing. Boring this certainly ain't and as for that other thing… i think i have some basic idea what they don't think they know the fuck they're doing and they're doing it just fine and it's fucking glorious and i love every fucking second of it!
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Yet another EP by Bristol's leading powerpop/postpunk manufacture holds yet another pair of irresistibly melancholic earworms. Does it still make sense to namedrop Television Personalities here or might this shit already qualify as downright, dare i say it… beatlesque?
The debut EP by Brisbane's Refedex is a heavy steamroller of dark noise rock, sludge and post punk that's often rather slow and atmospheric without ever getting tedious or losing its irresistible groove. Although their overall vibe sounds ultra-classic to me, i'm having trouble pinpointing exactly where i've heard this kind of thing before as their sound kinda transcends the usual genre boundaries, among other things incorporating the kind of dark americana blues & country vibes you might expect from an 80's Scientists record or more recently from US post punk group Bambara, while on the more classic noise rock side of things, you might draw comparisons to contemporary Bands like Alpha Strategy, Luggage, Heads or Tropical Trash. You might also find a bit of Cows, U-men or Scratch Acid in there, each of them spun on half-speed. Whatever you wanna call it, this is first rate shit!
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Power pop aficinados might already be familiar with Owen Williams as the singer of The Tubs, who stood out earlier this year with their excellent Names 7". Cotton Crown is the name of his solo recording project whose debut cassingle inhabits much of the same awesomeness but enriches its two oldschool pop tunes with more of a goth and new wave aesthetic adding just the right amount of low-level cheesyness to elevate, rather than water down the material.
