Roo Stafford of Leicester, England has already been fucking around for a couple years on a number of really neat EPs but the dude truly hits the nail on the head with this newest one, a no-filler kickass batch of unpretentious garage punk impact craters that feel more at home roughly around 2014-2020 than right now and perfectly fuse the uncontrollable chaos and wild creative drive of the early (proto-)egg generation á la Erik Nervous, Skull Cult, Neo Neos, Hobocop, Coneheads with the tight-ass performance of already more established garage punk acts of those years like Sauna Youth, Ex-Cult or early Useless Eaters into a dense explosive charge that once again feels like a breath of fresh air in our current, often overly sanitized (watered-down even?) era for that whole genre cluster.
Kaloomps, British Columbia group Headcheese have been messin' about for way longer than my intuition tells me as it still feels to me like their first Demo and self-titled debut mini-LP dropped just about yesterday, even though their most recent previous record Expired is actually like three years old by now. Anyway, this group has certainly left a thorough impresson in my faulty memory with a number of records that feel like an endless tug-of-war between successive impulses of elaborating on their sound and then dumbing it down again in the most thrilling way possible. Their newest one might well be their magnum opus so far though, with the group operating as a simultaneously tighter and rowdier-than-ever wrecking crew, pummeling into submission their most coherent, fleshed out bundle of chemically unstable creative outbursts so far, which no serious devotee of inventive, shaggy noise inbetween the worlds of KBD-injected garage punk, oldschool propulsive west coast-style hardcore and maybe even some particles of No Trend-, Broken Talent- or Flipper-esque proto noise rock mahem should miss out on.
This Dublin-based group's output so far is a bit of a, how should i put it... messy affair to say the least though it was never boring either, that's for sure. This new 2-track digital single may now mark their most successful attempt at uncluttering their creative vision so far and i'm nothing short of impressed with the classy oldschool indie rock vibes goin' on here, whose folk-ish strummyness recalls the glory days of Volcano Suns or one of their sorta-spiritual successors, the still active Tha Martha's Vineyard Ferries. The A-side Secret Bench In The Bardo is such a strong and striking example of that kind of thing the other tune Abacus Rubicon has to play second fiddle kinda by sheer circumstance, though that doesn't mean it's anything less than another perfectly pleasing late-eighties to mid-nineties postcore throwback in its own right.
Normally i tend to just skip this kind of a teaser release but it's been a slow summer anyway and this shit coming from a Glasgow, UK group is simply too freaking brilliant to not post here, a massive step up after their already really neat demo from last fall and i simply can't wait till the full 7" containing these two songs drops sometime later this year hopefully, for more of that cleverly conceived and infectiously catchy-and-noisy-as-fuck oldschool hardcore mayhem.
Philadelphia's Sims Hardin aka Society probably doesn't need an introduction here after the splashes he made with the deliciously scrappy 2022 EP All Flies Go To Hell, whose rough proto punk-ish energy subsequently got channeled into a more concrete, fleshed out art punk sound on 2024's brilliant Social Flies cassette, to which Reign Of Flies now feels like a direct sequel, but not without some clear refinements and growth along the way, setting this record apart with a more pronounced post punk-ish vibe to these tunes and a tighter grip on his catchy hooks than ever before. Yeah this is another must-have for connoisseurs of rough, artsy and eccentric DIY punk oddities.
The modern-day cowcore veterans from Austin, Texas return just a year after their quite good but also a bit too long and somewhat disjointed previous dose of pure chaos that was the Miracle Whip-It LP on Digital Hotdogs. This new EP now is in a way the exact opposite of that, their most condensed and coherent record so far with all the excess fat removed, eight minutes of super-dense excellence bursting at the seams from an abundance of clever ideas, heavy duty hooks and melodies in a massive spell of heavily Dicks-informed insanity.
Bordeaux, the wine-producing capital of France honestly doesn't have shit on, like, our local beer hotspots of Hansa, North Rhine-Westphalia and Karlskrone, southern Aldi but i gotta admit they've had some neat bands there over the years like Videodrome and Black Bug from earlier days or Distance more recently. But anyway, Haro in some aspects kinda fit an established template of french post punk / postcore groups of the Youth Avoiders and Nightwatchers ilk, although they completely forgo the subgenre's fashionable Oi! elements of late in exchange for a more elaborate and epic sound cleaverly constructed into widescreen melodramas that totally hold their own in that sector and i guess it's that scope that prompted some trusted authority in the field of bands that kinda sound like Coldplay to tell me this band kinda sounds like Coldplay in the EP's opening tune so now i think i've gotta check out these Coldplay dudes, they must be a swell band if true!
It hasn't been a massive music week otherwise but at least it's been a decent one for groups whose name ends in -ro which make up a whopping 50% of this week's blog output. Apéro from Hamburg, Germany already left a thoroughly convincing impression with their debut EP Cold Drinks, Cool Snacks last year and their newest EP continues in the same vein of moderately egg-ish, catchy-ass garage- and synth punk, the first two tunes being perfectly cromulent if maybe a bit routine examples in their own right, though it's the second half where this record really comes alive with a barrage of timeless power pop hooks that among other things kinda channel some older Sheer Mag energy.
Just like that Celebrators LP i've just posted, the debut LP of Oamaru, New Zeeland group Cuticles is yet another really freakin' good 21-song LP that could have become a freakin' brillian 15-song LP just by cutting some fat but ya know... i'm not gonna complain about such an abundance of good, especially if that shit is so fucking up my alley. Featuring members of 2010s NZ DIY punk staples Moonrakers and Trendees, this group, which first really caught my attention with their excellent 2023 EP Pavlova, certainly shares some of that shambolic avantgarde DNA but channels it into a much more catchy and melodic whole, trading in much of that raw Half Japanese-style mayhem for a more approachable aesthetic, reminiscent among others of old british DIY acts in the neighborhood of Swell Maps, Television Personalities, Mekons and Desperate Bicycles. There's a good deal of old Flying Nun energy goin' on aswell plus some stray occurences of the more pop-focused end of the Pink Flag-era Wire spectrum in tunes like Making Up Shit. If i had to come up with more recent bands as comparisons, i'd say New York's Famous Logs in History, Philadelphia group Society and the early works of Adelaide's own Wireheads don't strike my as totally off either.
This Los Angeles group has crafted a deliberately cluttered and disjointed yet insanely exciting mess of a record that seems to take inspiration from old heroes of the art punk world ranging from the likes of The Pop Group, Pylon and hints of James Chance, Pere Ubu and even a slight trace of Wire to their more underground and, potentially, more synth-heavy counterparts á la Minimal Man, Visitors, Neverous Gender... and yeah, quite obviously there's also some Devo DNA embedded in there. Or, in more recent years, you may also find some common ground here with contemporary acts like Landowner, Cartoon or Ismatic Guru. Then again, the folk-ish strummy energy goin' on 0126iii recalls the likes of Angst, Volcano Suns or early My Dad Is Dead. Anyway, there's a great deal of variety and an uncontainable creative momentum happening on this record and even though not every experiment pays off equally well here, with a generous 21 Tunes assembled here i think it's just fair to rate this album by its abundance of hits rather than its rare misses.
