With members of Vexx, Gen Pop and Sweeping Promises among them, who’d expect anything short of sheer awesomeness from this Seattle group? Sheer awesomeness is exactly what we get, of course. These eight songs are noise pop candy of the highest caliber, taking some cues out of the playbook of vaguely surf-, more or less JMC-influenced acts such as early Primitives, Joanna Gruesome, early Wavves, Male Bonding or, most recently, UV-TV, the underlying songs being strong enough to still work if you strip away the ubiquitous layer of fuzz, as they do in the gorgeous title track, a melancholy dream pop ballad.
Curious mixture of hardcore-, anarcho- and post punk on this Kingston, NY group’s debut tape, assembling a distinct style out of gritty KBD-drenched vibes à la Launcher, a hint of UK82 energy, plenty of Rudimentary Peni and the occasional bit of Crass.
Heavily retro-leaning post punk, made in Berlin and sounding exactly like you'd come to expect by that fact. You might recognize a familiar voice grumbling about here, the dude having done a similar thing with his other band Maske, although the overall vibe here is even a notch more gritty, sometimes having a slightly Wipers-esque quality and, at other points, a touch of S.Y.P.H. as well as more recent phenomena like Aus, Hyäne, Die Wärme or Peter Muffin und die Heilsarmee. In other words: This might have come out sometime around '81 just as well. There's a couple of underwhelming filler tracks on here - forgivable and totally made up for by the undeniable highlights of this album. Just don’t try another attempt at funk next time, okay?
Fuck, that shit smells… but in a good way. After their mildly disturbing one-and-a-half tapes on Impotent Fetus we finally get their first “full” length cassette from Tetryon Tapes and once again this is some joy to behold. Ultra-septic hard- and noisecore vaguely reminiscent of present-day acts like Soupcans, Stinkhole or Vulture shit but also of old pioneers of the Flipper, No Trend, Broken Talent variety. There was a time when, as a kid, folks from my church told me that listening to evil rock’n’roll music might give you a demon infestation (thankfully, the fearmongering didn’t work for long…). I don’t know what listening to C-Krit is gonna leave you with but its side effects include violent sarcasm, diarrhea and not giving a shit.
Here we have another kickass, kinda oldschool australian garage punk artifact conjured up by some folks who unquestionably know their craft. On vocal duties we got none other than the great Jackson Reid Briggs who, free of the temptations of guitars and pedals and shit, sounds kinda revitalized here, unleashing a more nuanced performance than what we’ve been used to, while the rest of the line-up does by no means consist of unknown faces either, boasting members of Stiff Richards and Speed Week, among others. Captivating through simple but well-balanced songcraft and an unstoppable drive, this shit sounds instantly familiar yet comes across playful and versatile enough to clearly differentiate these songs from any of the aforementioned groups.
A veritable gut punch, the debut tape of this St. Louis, Missouri group. Hardcore punk with elaborate & flexible anything-goes song structures, at times catchy and melodic, in other parts showing a gloomy post punk / death rock undercurrent and also there’s some of that oh-so-fashionable (don’t get me wrong, i totally love that) garage edge to it. You might be reminded of hardcore-era Hüsker Dü at some points, as well as recent hard- and postcore stuff such as Nopes, Pink Guitars, Cement Shoes or the colorful yet nightmarish hardcore psychedelia of Murderer.
A new tape by that mystery outfit (possibly) from Hicksville, NY on which they stay as unpredictable as ever, this time delivering a batch of infectious below-one-minute melodic garage smashers - high speed fuzzy power pop kinda like an alternate-reality garage incarnation of early Guided By Voices.
With quite a bit of delay - as has unfortunately become kind of the new normal for anything intended to be released on vinyl - we get the newest opus of sweden’s prime synth punk outfit Isotope Soap and oh boy, is this a spaced out new level of quirky and weird even for this group. As you might have noticed by now, i’m a sucker for this kind. Consisting roughly half of instrumental interludes radiating vibes not unlike a bizarro John Carpenter score, the actual Songs on this LP more than ever seem to draw inspiration from oldschool pioneers of the genre - yeah, of course there is some Devo in there but even more i’d suggest stuff like Screamers, Units and Nervous Gender, all mixed with more recent groups 'a la Set-Top Box, Digital Leater and, occasionally, i even sense a touch of grim post punk in the vein of Video or VHS.
Well here’s yet another batch of low-originality, high-enjoyability first-rate kickass Garage Punk, the straightforward no-frills kind that will help out those who are already showing their first Sick Thoughts withdrawal symptoms and the kind that won’t alarm fans of Dadar, Shitty Life or, at some points, Booji Boys too much either. These pretty normal Babies only drink beer after all, rather than blood. Admittedly, that’s mildly surprising indeed for a group from Trittsburgh, Trennsylvania.
A fun, smart high-energy blow of garage-infused hardcore punk delivered by a group that might or mightn’t be from Long Beach, California, holding a perfect balance between dumb straight-ahead oldschool energy and the various quirks and eccentricities of more recent hardcore phenomena, which sorta locates them on the genre map somewhere in the excellent company of other contemporary troublemakers such as Mystic Inane, Launcher, Fried E/M, Modern Needs or Liquid Assets.