No rocket science on Chubby & The Gang's debut album, just the plain old melodic punk rock schtick. But boy, is that some really fucking good stuff. '77 catchyness is injected with loads of hardcore energy and given a rough garage surface. Kinda like Booji Boys recorded in high fidelity.
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Atlanta noise rockers Vangas stay beautifully unconventional on their new 7" via Chunklet. On the A-side, a slow-burning groove creeps along toward an inevitable eruption at its midpoint, where shit finally gets weird. The even more unpleasant B-side then reminds me quite a bit of their Portland noise rock contemporaries Marriage + Cancer or canadians Nearly Dead.
This debut EP by Philadelphia band Gunky is kind of an odd and deliciois bastard of (post-)punk and noise, boldly plundering its way through large portions of underground punk history. I think i hear some echoes of MX-80 and mid-eighties Sonic Youth, The Mentally Ill and of early Saccharine Trust's proto postcore. In other moments, their sound reminds me of more recent bands, the likes of like Patti or Plax.
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This group, probably from Phoenix, Arizona, sets up some chemically unstable noise punk shit welded to a garagecore rocket drive ready to blow up in your face. At times you might feel pleasantly reminded of acts like Beast Fiend, Anxiety, Bo Gritz or Mystic Inane.
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Another batch of awesome garage punk with an occasional hardcore edge from the ever reliable melbourne scene. At times, Punter's music has a frantic quality reminiscent of Jackson Reid Briggs & The Heaters, combined with the slightly more grounded garage sound of Civic or earlier Vaguess, with the latter's pop instincts as well as some Pist Idiots-style drama boiling over at the EP's most anthemic moment, A Minute's Silence.
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I'm not sure if Alien Nosejob currently exist as a full blown band, but at least for their second long playing effort, Jake Robertson (Ausmuteants, School Damage, Leather Towel, Hierophants, etc.) has been recording everything on his own. While the last few releases turned out to be a rather wild and unpredictable ride - touching on Power-/Jangele Pop, Synth Pop and Hardcore Punk among other things - Alien Nosejob's newest album is an unexpectedly consistent work mostly operating in a spectrum of sad power pop and more familiar Ausmuteants style garage fare, wrapped in a warm and fuzzy analog aesthetic varying from mid- to high fidelity. Without exception, these songs are top rate stuff, just classic Robertson at his best.
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On their newest EP, Washington's Iron Cages give us three excellent new blasts of garagified hardcore punk which indicate massive step forward for the band, towards a more compact and coherent sound friends of stuff along the lines of Fried Egg, Punk Guitars, Cülo, Anxiety or Electric Chair will surely appreciate.
What a beautifully deranged kind of mess, the second Album by Trashdog a.k.a. Andrew Jackson, the dude also responsible for Austin, Texas label Digital Hotdogs. I didn't expect a lot of normalcy here to begin with, but nonetheless i'm kind of astonished by the massive amount of top notch goodness scattered wildly across this record, especially after i found Trashdog's first effort to be of somewhat inconsistent quality. Roughly one third here consists of dumb jokes and various shades of fucking around. Another third turns out to be brilliantly weird and inventive songcraft in a spectrum of garage punk, power pop, synth-/electro punk and a tiny hint of glam. And as for the remaining third, i'm somewhat undecided in which of the first two categories i should file that stuff. The whole of it makes for an awesome, if at times overwhelming, disorienting roller coaster ride. Some kind of white album on stupid pills.
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Moist Boy from New Bedford, Massachusetts are one of the rare cases in which a band comes somewhat close to what you could call pop punk without immediately pissing me off. But for me, that's having most to do with incredibly low standards in that particular genre rather than an aversion to simple, straightforward melodies. Pop punk bands just tend to fuck up even the most basic, fundamental components of decent punk rock.
Moist Boy don't suck in the slightest and that's thanks to first rate songwriting abilities, an adequately tight and punchy performance and - to counter the sweet catchyness of their melodies - a distinct garage edge as well as some rather dark lyrical content. Quality stuff throughout and required listening if you appreciate bands like Cheap Whine, Dark Thoughts, Steve Adamyk Band… maybe even The Marked Men!
This already marks the second time these two bands from Indianapolis are pooling their, um… resources for a split release - this time it's a 7" on Goodbye Boozy Records. Not only is the recording quality a little bit less rough than last time; both bands have also significantly diversified their musical vocabulary.
The Resource Network alternate between smartypants garage punk of the Uranium Club & Yammerer variety, a post punk/-core thingy you could imagine as a weird mix of Rites Of Spring and early Slovenly, and finally a straight punk rocker radiating a Launcher-style KBD Vibe.
Quite a bit of the latter you can also find on Big Hog's side and there's less of a hardcore edge to their new songs - instead you'll find a wild post punk ride you might describe as Patti-meet-early-Minutemen, surrounded by two blasts of noise punk resembling what Lumpy & The Dumpers could have sounded like on some sort of sludge/doom trip.
