Pyrex - Pyrex

Ex­cel­lent shit as usu­al via To­tal Punk. This New York group's de­but LP cer­tain­ly won't open a new chap­ter for pitch black post punk, yet it man­ages to cap­ti­vate nonethe­less, by means of sheer force and in­ten­si­ty rather than fi­nesse, charg­ing up a sound fa­mil­iar to fans of, say, Crim­i­nal Code, Sieve­head or Rank/​Xerox with a raw en­er­gy akin to At­lanta groups Nag and Preda­tor, some of the psy­che­del­ic un­der­cur­rents of stuff á la Pub­lic In­ter­est, Waste Man or Pub­lic Eye.

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Channel 83 - Artificial Unintelligence

Fun­ny what a few years of egg­punk-re­lat­ed in­san­i­ty do to your brain. When Chan­nel 83's pre­vi­ous EP dropped in 2019, i con­sid­ered this shit to be pret­ty far out there and to­tal­ly bonkers while in '23, i can't help but think they fit right in with the cur­rent wave of quirky syn­th­punk acts. I don't con­sid­er that a bad thing at all though. These new songs rip!

Display Homes - What If You're Right And They're Wrong?

Sad­ly over­shad­owed by the death of their their gui­tar play­er Dar­rell, the Syd­ney group's first LP via Er­ste Theke sig­ni­fies a ma­jor leap in qual­i­ty af­ter their al­ready quite en­joy­able pre­vi­ous E.T.A. EP, show­cas­ing the band as a much tighter unit de­liv­er­ing their sim­ple but ef­fec­tive, al­ways catchy and dance­able blend of time­less post punk with im­pres­sive pre­ci­sion and con­fi­dence. As be­fore, there's plen­ty of Py­lon groove and en­er­gy con­tained in here while at dif­fer­ent points you might al­so find sim­i­lar­i­ties to con­tem­po­rary acts such as Lithics, Pinch Points, Rank/​Xerox, Slumb Par­ty or Nots, with oc­ca­sion­al flash­es of Pix­ies-es­que surf-ish gui­tar leads.

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Mononegatives - Crossing Visual Field

A whole bar­rage of dig­i­tal sin­gles in re­cent weeks al­ready ap­peared to fore­shad­ow a new record by the Lon­don, On­tario group and in­deed here it is, their sec­ond LP in all its glo­ry, car­ry­ing an ex­cel­lent new batch of their quite dis­tinct, catchy as hell, al­ways slight­ly off-kil­ter and quirky genre mix­ture con­tain­ing el­e­ments of garage-, post- and synth punk, space- and psy­che­del­ic rock. You might com­pare some bits and pieces here to such groups as Pow!, Use­less Eaters and of course the re­cent col­lab­o­ra­tion Telegenic Plea­sures which al­so fea­tures some of the band mem­bers at work here - at this point though, i'd say they're pret­ty much carved out their own, in­stant­ly rec­og­niz­able lit­tle niche.

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During - During

It took a good while for this group's de­but LP to fi­nal­ly ma­te­ri­al­ize af­ter the the la­bel Chun­klet In­dus­tries al­ready promised this long­play­er around the re­lease of the Birds Of Juneau 7" in the sum­mer of 2021… I sus­pect you can once again blame the chal­lenges of the cur­rent vinyl econ­o­my for that. It's an­oth­er strong record though, on which the group fea­tur­ing mem­bers of such pow­er­hous­es as Spray Paint, Wil­ful Boys, Brandy, Pam­pers and Pyrex ad­mirably man­ages to keep things ex­cit­ing with quite a bit of eclec­tic va­ri­ety. For ex­am­ple, we get a kind of Swell Maps-go-Syn­th­wave vibes in HoloLens, a strong dub feel in Mall­man, kin­da like a sped-up vari­ant of Ex­ek. That all said, you can't re­al­ly de­ny their sound ob­vi­ous­ly hav­ing in­her­it­ed the largest chunk of its DNA from Spray Paint, es­pe­cial­ly their lat­er work (al­though, speak­ing of DNA, a cer­tain no wave vibe is ever present on here aswell). Fur­ther i've al­so got a sus­pi­cion though that there'll be some quite fa­mil­iar sound­ing echoes of this record to be heard on the up­com­ing Pyrex LP on To­tal Punk!

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Shop Talk - The Offering

I think this is the same band i've been yap­ping about many moons ago.. Their 2016 EP ap­pears to have been com­plete­ly wiped from the face of the earth and the web though, which is a fuck­ing shame re­al­ly 'cos this was good stuff al­ready. But ad­mit­ted­ly, this shit is so much bet­ter… Melod­ic punk and garage vibes rule supreme here with more than a lit­tle hint of Dick­ies and some dis­tinct '77 and pow­er pop fla­vors that would al­ready make for a per­fect­ly sol­id EP. What pro­pells this one from good to plain out-of-the-ball­park spec­tac­u­lar though are the ad­vanced song­writ­ing chops on dis­play here, run­ning cir­cles around 99% of all oth­er cur­rent punk groups play­ing sim­ple, straight­for­ward pop tunes. This is tru­ly tran­scen­dent, next-lev­el shit, i mean it!

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C57BL/​6 - LP 1

It's been a whop­ping five years since we last heard of this Los An­ge­les group. Their first LP (duh!) is a bit heav­ier on the hard­core- and garage punk side of things af­ter their old­er shit had been lean­ing stronger in­to its synth-/elec­tro punk ten­den­cies. Those re­lent­less­ly bru­tal elec­tric beats are still front and cen­ter here though, giv­ing es­pe­cial­ly the epic open­ing shot Open World kind of an in­dus­tri­al-tinged, cursed Aus­muteants-meet-Big Black vibe… with ad­di­tion­al over­tones of Cri­sis Man maybe?

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Faulty Cognitions - Demo

This San An­to­nio, Texas group de­lights with a throw­back to the most melod­ic parts of eight­ies punk, in­die- and col­lege rock, clear­ly in­formed by the likes of Hüsker Dü, Re­place­ments, Mov­ing Tar­gets, Guid­ed By Voic­es and Di­nosaur Jr. in the more jan­g­ly melod­ic mo­ments, as well as some ear­ly Naked Ray­gun in the straight-ahead rockin' tunes, all of it held to­geth­er by fric­tion­less song­writ­ing that wouldn't feel too out of place with more re­cent bands á la Boo­ji Boys, Bad Sports, TV Crime or Bed Wet­tin' Bad Boys ei­ther.

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Poison Ruïn - Härvest

In a some­what un­ex­pect­ed but, all things con­sid­ered, per­fect­ly sen­si­ble move, the Philadel­phia group on the cut­ting edge of the still kin­da vague­ly de­fined and de­vel­op­ing dun­geon punk genre re­lease their first full length ef­fort on the well es­tab­lished, rather met­al-lean­ing la­bel Re­lapse Records. Thank­ful­ly this has pre­cious lit­tle in­flu­ence on their sound, aes­thet­ics and pro­duc­tion val­ues, with their newest batch of songs even pre­sent­ing the group at their grit­ti­est and most Lo-Fi so far, their still ab­solute­ly sin­gu­lar, elab­o­rate son­ic con­structs made up of post- and garage punk, noise rock, post­core, a very slight hint of Oi! and on­ly the most an­cient in­gre­di­ents of pro­to- and old-old­school met­al re­main­ing ob­scured by in a thick lay­er of tape hiss all the time. Yeah, the whole thing sounds glo­ri­ous i got­ta say!

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Chinese Mudmen - Meet The Mud /​ Mud On Mud

Crawl­ing out of the same brown pud­dle that pre­vi­ous­ly spat out the won­ders of Scab Breath we get two more raw and de­light­ful clumps of garage punk, this time with more of an hard­core edge to it and a slight note of KBD muck. An at­tack on the sens­es just as straight­for­ward as it's crude and sham­bol­ic - traits you might al­so find in re­cent acts á la Mod­ern Needs, Liq­uids or Fried E/​m.

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