Exquisite shit from Rouen, France. Kumusta emerge on the scene with a fun mixture drawing a line from noise rock & -core on one end of the spectrum, some raw garage energy on the other, a shitload of post punk & postcore in between. Imagine a fusion of slowed-down Bad Breeding with Criminal Code in certain moments, or at other times, you might be reminded of Australia's postcore powertools Batpiss and Bench Press.
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Last year's long playing debut by Seattle group Big Bite already struck me as an anomaly of the most welcome kind. Now their sophomore effort comes across as no less brilliant - once again breathing new life into a particular 90s niche, oscillating somewhere between straightforward, no-fuss but high-thrust indie- and alternative rock plus a bit of shoegaze. Think Sugar, Polvo or Swervedriver when it comes to bands of the aforementioned era, or of more recent acts like early Ovlov, Pardoner, Milked or Dead Soft. Psychedelic moments are given a bit more emphasis here than on their first, while in the album's final stretch you can sense a subtle post punk vibe of the Teenanger or Constant Mongrel variety.
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Once again Barcelona's scene is killing it! Plataforma manage to do just that thanks to a beautifully rough, DIY-as-fuck sound in the realm of dark-/post punk with a healthy dose of goth/death rock doom & gloom. Crisis come to mind as well as the early 2010's Kopenhagen scene - think Lower and early Iceage - and some more recent stuff like britain's Disjoy.
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While their last EP Fan The Flames didn't appeal to me as much as i hoped for, their newest 7" shows London's Girls In Synthesis at their best. Just like before, their sound is a skilled balancing act on the threshold between post punk and noise rock, thus operating in much of the same realm as Bands like USA Nails, Tunic or John (timestwo), among others. The definite highlight here is Smarting with its kinda Big Black-esque way of guitar shredding.
This band from Richmond, Virginia gives us another ten minutes of pissed off and exquisite no-frills garage punk just dripping with loads of raw hardcore energy.
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Barcelona's Lux already have a demo and a promising debut album under their belt, but with this recent EP their sound really clicks into gear, in which some of the more excentric strands of 80s post- and hardcore punk - Man Sized Action and The Proletariat come to mind - collide with distinctive goth/deathpunk bass lines. You might also be reminded of more recend bands like Street Eaters or the potent cowpunk propulsion of Murderer.
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Three short bursts of quite charming Lo-Fi garage punk by some dude or band from Melbourne, moving on a scale between dangerously catchy power pop melodies and determined hardcore attacks. Friends of acts like Booji Boys, Datenight, Erik Nervous or Neo Neos will certainly appreciate this.
This Toronto/Vancouver based group featuring members of Damagers, among others, gives us yet another one of those fuzzed out, deliciously explosive hardcore-/garage punk mixtures, at times evoking comparisons to Vertigo, Fried Egg, Kaleidoscope or Cülo. Excellent stuff!
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Five short and fun blasts of off-kilter genre blurring rumble - part garage-/fuzz punk, part hard-/weird-/noisecore, part KBD style strangeness. Somewhat like a mix of Lumpy & The Dumpers and Murderer, this shit might also contain traces of Flipper and No Trend.
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Not too long after a rather synth-heavy tape by that guy who recently seems to be involved in pretty much any other Berlin band, we get a small encore exhibiting a more guitar-centric sound, shifting the sonic coordinates closer to the garage. The overall vibe here kinda reminds me of early Erik Nervous.
