With their first long playing cassette, Paz SS from Valencia, Spain deliver a good batch of plain old garage- and fuzz punk done right, eqipped with the necessary propulsion by a thoroughly competent band. You might compare them to the straght garage punk of bands like Ex Cult, Sauna Youth or Foul Swoops, the energetic Fuzzcore of Ill Globo and occasionally there's even a faint shimmer of Wipers.
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A somewhat quirky animal, this debut album by Minneapolis' Basement Boys. Starts out by radiating a kind of post punk vibe similar to Plax or The Cowboy, then increasingly skews toward garage punk, augumented by a small dose of noise and some beach goth melancholy, at times reminding me of stuff like Co Sonn, Ex-Cult, Shark Toys or early Wavves.
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On their debut LP, Barcelona's Sandré deliver a roundhouse kick of unerring precision, a sound located somewhere on the fringes of post punk, post- and noisecore; always keeping the delicate balance between a raw, immediate impact and self-confident ambition. Speculating about possible influences, i'm thinking of a wide array of bands like Downtown Boys, early Die! Die! Die!, Les Savy Fav - but i'm also feeling a very distinct vibe akin to other spanish acts of recent years, especially the likes of Juventud Juché, Betunizer and Cubano Vale.
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Boston electro punk duo Rita Repulsa enter the scene with their first EP, whose largely sample-driven contents roughly resemble the charme of an extra brain damaged version of North Carolina's ISS, supplemented with a subtle dose of noise rock and a lyrical fixation on… Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?!? Works for me.
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Richard Rose are a new band from Los Angeles whose lineup includes members of Ex-Cult, GØGGS, Bad Sports and OBN IIIs - in the small world of garage punk, it doesn't get much more exquisite than this! Their music however doesn't sound all that much like california to me, but rather i'm reminded of high energy australian garage acts like Jackson Reid Briggs & The Heaters, Mini Skirt, Dumb Punts or WOD. Somewhat of an outlier here is Queen Selene, a crawling stoner jam, which is usually not exactly my cup of tea, but for some reason i kinda like this one.
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Wet Specimens' current EP - their third already - turns out to be a massive sonic assault made of uncompromising breakneck hardcore punk with traces of post-/dark punk, bearing some similarity to what we've heard in recent years from bands like Acrylics, Policy, Anxiety or Impulso.
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Warp hail from San Francisco and have members of - among others - Flesh World and Blank Square among their lineup. Their debut album is already kicking butts in a fully convincing fashion and delivers an adorably excentric sound roughly in the realm of fuzz- & garage punk, hard- & postcore which comes across just as unpolished as it's inventive. The whole thing is somewhat reminiscent of bands like Vexx or Dots, as well as the occasional faint echo of Surfa Rosa-era Pixies. Quality stuff!
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Whoa… three years after i first noticed this band from leeds and a quite charming, chaotic early EP of theirs, i honestly didn't expect their debut album to blow my socks off the way it did just now. Instead of the EP's relaxed DIY-Vibes you now find yourself in the middle of a ferocious high speed trip whose rough coordinates hover somewhere between fuzzed out space-, psych- and garage punk. Sure, these Songs won't win any awards for their originality but totally make up for that by developing into a blast so potent and restless it doesn't give you a second to think about such bullshit anyway. I'm reminded of bands like Destruction Unit, Wash, Flat Worms, Draggs or even japanese genre veterans High Rise.
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For the austin noise rockers with that distinctive no wave edge, the past three years were marked exclusively by several collaboration projects, resulting in one album, another EP and two 7"s, all of it first rate stuff. Now we get a new "regular" album, although the recordings already date back to the year 2016. Accordingly, these songs sound more like the logical evolution from their last LP Feel The Clamps, released that same year. As always with this band, there's no rush to reinvent themselves. Instead, their sound is evolving gradually and diligent, revealing only a few new facets at a time. Most notable this time is a more minimalist approach to their compositions as well as the increasing use of drum machines and synths. And as always, the results are quite thrilling.
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