These australians’ 2023 mini-LP was tons of weird-ass dungeon- and fantasy-themed fun already and their newest longplayer has an even stronger batch of headsplitting tunes made up of elements of garage-, synth- and post punk that right out of the gate delights with a distinct flavor of vintage Useless Eaters and Ausmuteants action in the opening track Pillager, complemented with a note of psych-/acid Punk á la Pow! in Moneyman while Big Hat – one of two holdovers first heard on their 2021 Mammon Machine EP – has a bit of a Strange Attractor vibe and Dopaminer may easily fool you into thinking it’s an exceptionally strong Why Bother? tune. Further, i can imagine friends of the likes of slightly more dungeon-flavored like Curta’n Wall or Oslo’s own eggpunks Molbo getting a kick outta this shit.
This is a great week to channel your inner basic punk bitch as at least three out of the four records i’m posting today aren’t exactly gonna win any awards for innovation and originality but make up for it by sheer competence in songwriting and determined sledgehammer performances. And so does this new Citric Dummies Record (which is exactly as much a split record as Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass was a Hüsker Dü record and Die Nasty had any Rikk Agnew on it), which pretty much perfects the group’s formula combining lots of Dead Boys energy with some Rocket From The Tombs and Death-informed proto punk flourishes, some pre-Rollins Black Flag- and Bad Brains-ish early hardcore punk to a highly flammable concoction that, despite inspiring all that retro name dropping, manages to feel weirdly contemporary.
Fuck yeah it’s yet another Imploders record free of big surprises but also free of disappointments. As before they seem to lean entirely on oldschool hardcore bits and tropes, none of which wouldn’t have existed already by 1983 at the very latest. The shit just works ‘cos the Toronto group knows one or two things about robustly constructing a catchy tune and hammering it home in a powerful precision attack.
As with their previous two-and-a-half EPs, Denver, Colorado group Glueman ain’t fucking around here, sticking to their basics in the form of no-frills straightforward and noisy garage punk that never fails to hit the nail right on the head with this bunch of new tunes which are gonna have admirers of shit á la Buck Biloxi, Sick Thoughts, The Dirts or Bart and the Brats approvingly bobbing along once again.
Nothing less than a plausible contender for hardcore record of the year comes to us from the Milwaukee label Unlawful Assembly, a brand spanking new split LP by two Austin, Texas groups who’ve both previously made some waves already with excellent debut tapes on the local label Sound Grotesca in 2021 and ’22 respectively. Both groups operating on the rougher end of the hardcore punk spectrum, they certainly don’t invent anything new here but rather, they charge up tried and tested ingredients of noisy oldschool hardcore with a sense of danger and unpredictability rarely heard in their particular niches. Right out of the gate, Save Our Children’s tunes strike me as wildly more more elaborate and inventive and in a whole different league compared to the bulk of variably oldschool thrash-infused hardcore groups, the grim overall sound aesthetics unable to fully distract from a pervasive sense of musical adventure and playfulness. And if you thought all that was already going way above and beyond your average hardcore punk offering, wait till you get to hear those Stunted Youth tracks, which exchange the slightly metallic flavor with a more garage-y feel and a lot of subtle melodic flourishes to their underlying tunes, coupled with some world-class hyperactive shredding and tons of unexpected catchyness in their breakneck speed attacks. This is the perfect storm of both creative and primal energies i’d wish to see unleashed more regularly in a genre that all too often seems content with just replicating the most basic, established tropes ad nauseam.
The Nashville, Tennessee eggpunk übergroup is back with a second LP that ain’t nearly as radical a departure from their previous work as the thumping electric beats of the preview track Worldwide would’ve had us believe at first. Rather, after the culture shock of their first LP which saw their first live band incarnation ripping through most of the early EPs’ material with unrelenting hardcore intensity, this new one is in parts a bit of a return to the playful and varied experimentation of their early days. Like with its predecessor, we’ve heard some of these tunes before in one form or another, most notably Subdivision, which has first been heard all the way back in 2022 on their Town Topic 7″ and the Beatles cover tune Come Together which goes even further back, first appearing on 2021’s G.T.R.R.C. III compilation, though both have been given a thorough makover here and so have most of the previously known tunes. What can is say, this album is yet another fun, glorious freakout of quirky, catchy noise on the fringes of garage- and post punk that never seems to run out of steam and ideas.
Two years after their super fun debut EP, Philadelphia’s cleanest finally present us with their first LP which doubles down on the chaotic energy of their disjointed art punk that sits comfortably between the chairs of dissonant, oldschool no wave-ish noise, artcore elements akin to early Minutemen and also plenty of more recent phenomena from artsy post punk groups like Patti, Reality Group and Brandy to more postcore-leaning acts like Big Bopper, Cutie, Mystic Inane and Rolex. And i gotta say, their math-y convoluted sound does a pretty decent job of approximating the mental overload and challenge the task of cleaning up the cave presents to my ADHD-cluttered, probably mildly autistic brain… but they sure make it sound like the most fun activity in the world.
Okay here’s some new shit of this, apparently, newly UK-based dude who’s supposed to be from Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico originally, which is a real town actually but a quite small one at that and thus i’m just gonna say that statistically… Yeah to be honest, i don’t know if there’s any truth (or consequences for that matter) to anything the Bandcamp bio tells me about Jacket Burner. There’s little doubt about the qualities of his new LP though, which comes with his strongest batch of tunes to date and once again gets the maximum oomph out of tried-and-tested oldschool garage punk formulas that kinda feels like the basic traits of Buck Biloxi, Spits, early Sick Thoughts and Bart and The Brats being boiled down into strong and exquisite shots of poison with a striking note of ’77 and KBD-related simplicity.
More exciting eggpunk of the minimalist and fuzz-heavy variety comes to us from this UK-based group whose tunes don’t do much to break the established patterns at first glance, but who fucking cares really when every single one hits the nail on the head so effortless and precise in an all-killer succession of snappy and catchy-as-fuck fuzz pop attacks that call to mind a mixture of, say, Elvis 2, Kid Chrome, Power Pants, S.B.F. and Satanic Togas.
Incredible debut EP by a London group fronted by Chubby (of Chubby and the Gang fame of course), whose vocals are probably the thing most reminiscent of his old band here, as the rustic Oi!-aesthetics – while still subtly present here like a faint background hum – give way to a somewhat more polished and vibrant but in no way less vigorous sound that feels like an ultra-compact encapsulation of various greatness in the melodic punk, power- and noise pop world both past and present, spanning from classic Hüsker Dü-ish vibes, over the instant catchyness of noise poppers Terry Malts and the most recent Dumpies and Eye Ball releases, to the strong melancholic touches of peak-era Leatherface or (Royal Headache-) Shogun’s recent groups Antenna and Finnogun’s Wake. Potent shit, can’t wait for more of that!
