This San Francisco group just delivered a stunningly confident debut LP made up of smart post punk and postcore, bursting with elaborate, dramaturgically dense song structures, tightly interlocking grooves and arrangements. In the contemporary landscape you might compare bits and pieces of this record to an expansive cluster of groups like Batpiss, Meat Wave, Bloody Gears, Stuck, Bench Press, Noughts, Lithics or Tunic. Going a bit further back in time, you might aswell recognize the obligatory bit of Drive Like Jehu, Fugazi or Jawbox, even find some Wire-esque flourishes in there if you just listen closely enough.
Dungeon punk's chief ambassadors bestow upon us the gift of three new battle cries and oh boy, are they getting more epic, determined, elaborate and ridiculous with each release… and i'm all down for it!
The Belgian garage punks' first full length release is hands down their strongest effort so far, a bottomless well of demented fun somewhere inbetween more straightforward garage fare á la Sick Thoughts, Shitty Life, Dadar and the ever-so-slightly more eleborate/artsy Ex-Cult, Tyvek or Shark Toys variety.
An excellent dispatch from the Chemnitz post punk scene mostly evoking comparisons to Berlin based acts á la Diät, Pigeon or Pretty Hurts, although you might also find some semblance of Stuttgart's Karies in there. The clear highlights on here are the almost balladesque songs Delirium and Das Programm, reaching melodic heights akin to the very best of Sievehead, Puritans or the most recent Criminal Code LP.
Spanish garage poppers Beta Máximo already left a rather positive impression on me with their couple of fairly recent EPs but with this one, they're finally nailing it if you ask me, striking a perfect balance between snappy garage punk and surf-infused power pop - kinda like a somewhat less eggy, less lo-fi incarnation of Barcelona group Prison Affair.
The second extended play by this New York group is a new load of highly concentrated post punk bliss, sure to energize admirers of powerhouse acts such as Rank/Xerox, Marbled Eye, Nag, Negative Space, Knowso or early Institute. There also appears to be a slight noise rock edge at play here, kinda reminding me of shit like Brandy or Cutie.
The first few noisy artifacts of this Detroit group - a kickass EP's worth of standalone tracks unceremoniously dumped on their bandcamp page - span a gamut evoking some of the best references on the intersection of garage punk and postcore, ranging from straightforward garage R'n'R acts á la Sick Thoughts, early Video & Teenanger, to the explosive genre bastards of Crisis Man, Ascot Stabber and Flowers Of Evil, not to mention some unmistakable Hot Snakes kind of vibe all the way through.
A new entry into the young dungeon punk microgenre coming our way from medieval Utrecht. That means competent new fodder for connoisseurs of D&D-savy imagery and themes, of heavy armor and blunt weapons as well as a small but expanding roundtable of skullcrushers á la Poison Ruïn, Bloody Keep, Weenog, Steröid or whoever else has recently been busy uniting the aesthetics of garage punk with those of oldschool black- and/or super-ancient "heavy" metal.
Pointy Sticks, the unexpectedly melodic opener of this Charlotte, Carolina group's debut cassette, kinda sounds like what i'd expect if weirdo garage punk outfit Print Head were to record a hardcore record. The rest of the tape remains beautifully eccentric too, mixing oldschool hardcore thrills with catchy garage hooks and, at times, the odd oldschool hard rock or doom riff, the latter suggesting stuff like Paranoise as a comparison. Other times, you might liken them to some Connie Voltaire hardcore project or the recent Hippyfuckers demo, all of that steeped in a rough fidelity akin to any random Deluxe Bias or Impotent Fetus release.
The New York group's newest cassette clicks with me instantly, their quirky power pop tunes striking me as a somewhat new wave-ish melange of melodic, predominantly early british post punk somewhere in the extended neighborhood of groups such as Desperate Bicycles, Mekons, Television Personalities and Swell Maps.
