Not a whole lot ever changes in the music of Vancouver’s Needles//Pins and in crap times like the past year-and-a-half, this familiarity is rather comforting. They still play that certain kind of punk rock… you know the one. The wholly unsubtle und unapologetically earnest, melodic, emotional and euphoric, the folk- and americana-infused kind. The kind that inevitably leads to embarrassing singalongs and awkward displays of emotion from concert audiences. Disgusting, man. I miss it so much…
Some pathetic loser in Leipzig, Germany is playing around with bleep-emitting hardware and recording equipment, not yet fully realizing this leads to him ending up fighting the good battle at the forefront of the egghead revolution. This record is a fucking masterpiece you need to have in your life. Having only listened to it once, i already feel a lot smarter, more balanced – full enlightenment only inches away. Almost being a wise old man myself, i can’t stress enough how fucking proud i am of this little shit.
The Berlin scene, where every musician is also secretly playing in all your other favorite groups, has dropped another pile of something. That something starts out kinda like S.Y.P.H. filtered through Wire and Crass, subsequently touching on Weirdcore stuff á la Stinkhole, Stuttgart-style-post-punk-but-much-more-fun and last but not least, dissonant post punk/proto noise sketches reminiscent of Membranes. Sometimes they opt to spew their lyrical nonsese in the english language which i think has its own awkward charm.
This demo by a Cardiff group lures the listener in with an ultra-raw hardcore red herring, though it doesn’t take long after that to realize there’s a lot more to this burst of concentrated Lo-Fi energy as you blaze a trail through a thick layer of fuzz and distortion, which finally gives way to bright flashes of melody and an overall soundscape combining core ingredients of post punk and noise pop, coming across kinda like a beautifully deformed crossbreed between Sievehead and Piles.
Business as usual on the newest 7″ by L.A.’s Flat Worms. Delightful, high quality business that is, with these two songs nailing their very own formula incorporating elements of garage punk, post punk and bursts of noise just dead on. So far, Flat Worms never failed to deliver the goods.
Let me be blunt here: You guys wanna convince me to pay the equivalent of ~4,60€ for a digital download of only two songs, those two songs better be fucking brilliant. Luckily, fucking brilliant is exactly what these these two tracks by some Tokyo group are. Ka-ching!
This London, Ontario group had put out a couple of already quite neat EP’s in 2019 but it’s only on their new full length debut that all the moving pieces really click into place for twelve 12XU-certified killer tracks made up of charmingly odd, highly inventive and exquisitely energetic garage-, synth- and post punk echoing shit like Useless Eaters, Pow!, Ex-Cult and Predator.
An abrasive yet quite melodic wall-of-sound piles up on this Aarhus group’s debut album, a sound inbetween the worlds of noise pop, art- and post punk, equally reminiscent of Teksti TV 666 and Open Your Heart-era The Men, 80’s SonicYouth-isms and some MX-80 edge. And as if all that weren’t compelling enough on its own, the addition of a restless brass section makes the whole thing outright irresistible.
This Los Angeles group’s most recent EP is some excellent, albeit disturbing shit. Gloomy post punk about rather dark subject matter concerning the human abysses both exposed and enabled by our modern technology (and yes, that explicitly includes child porn and -abuse, among other things). Sound-wise, i would describe this as a weird fusion of The Estranged and The Spits, supplemented with some serious death rock and synth wave action.
This week’s mandatory injection of Devo-ish garage- and synth-punk comes from some Perth based group whose quirky and catchy sounds surely won’t fail to more than adequately re-vitalize admirers of groups like Skull Cult, Research Reactor Corp., Alien Nosejob, Isotope Soap or Erik Nervous.
