New hardcore shit from Athens, Georgia that owes its overwhelming what-the-fuckness and disorienting qualities in part to the completely blown-out fucked-uppery in the engineering department but also in no small part to some hints of noisy Big Black-ishness that still seeps through the cracks underneath a brittle surface of pure distortion and white noise. Strip all that muck away and you may be left with the greatest or the worst hardcore performance in the world and i don't care either way 'cos the way it is, this shit sounds like pure bliss to me.
This group and their bandcamp profile feel weirdly familiar to me, even though this appears to be their first EP... have they changed their name maybe or had a previous release which has disappeared since? Well, most likely i'm just imagining things. Anyway, this is a neat little EP with a pretty oldschool post punk sound that at times complements its early Nots or classic Siouxsie kind of energy with just a hint of revolution summer-style early postcore urgency, most notably so in the standout tune H-21.
The second EP of these Oslo metalhead punks is yet another rippin' affair of NWOBHM-inspired hardcore thrashin' that feels a bit too old-fashioned to fit into the dungeon punk category, a bit too thrash-heavy to fit the motörpunk mold. There's also a bit of a '90s postcore quality goin'on in the closing track Shallow Grave. Sitting comfortably in the middle between a good number of adjacent niches, this is a record that scratches many itches at once and i'm all here for it.
Damn, has this band from Alicante, Spain upped their game since their promising but still inconsistent 2024 EPs! This is a make of Garage- and Eggpunk that on one hand operates very much inside the templates set by predominantly spanish groups á la Prison Affair, Sprgrs, Finale, Pringue or US-based acolytes Beer, but does so with a raw and propulsive force missing from many lesser players in the subgenre and these dudes also got the catchy-ass tunes to match the breakneck energy of their performance.
Physicalist is a new group from Vancouver i presume, centering around Dave P of the local power pop sensation Night Court whose catchy qualities are also present on this record of otherwise pretty different sonics, an infectious blend of hard-, art- and postcore with a distinct garage punk edge and melodic overtones which overall reminds me of a bunch of groups like Mystic Inane, Rolex, Launcher on the more hard-/artcore side of things and The Dumpies, Sauna Youth and Eyeball on the catchier, pop- and garage leaning side.
I don't have that much insightful to say about this nice EP other than this Boise, Idaho group dabbles in a certain sub-niche carved out previously by groups like Prison Affair, Beer and maybe Set-Top Box, playing out kinda like an extra-crude version of that particular stretch of the eggpunk landscape and succeeding exactly because of that dissonant crudeness, even if it ain't adding anything new or novel to the mix here.
Rough-ass KBD-infused oldschool garage punk shit that sounds to me as if the early works of Strange Attractor got fused with the primitive-as-fuck aesthetics and raw energy of early The Dogs or American Muscle, albeit with an altogether more solid and reliable bunch of tunes to draw from than what the aforementioned two acts had to work with in their earliest days. This shit kicks some serious ass, plain and simple.
The trajectory Brooklyn punks Shop Talk have taken over the years has certainly been among the less likely ones, having first come to my attention with their self-titled 2016 debut mini-LP, still featuring what i'd describe as a more leaned-back garage punk style very much of its time, somewhere inbetween equal parts Gun Club and contemporary acts of the time like Woolen Men and Eddy Current Suppression Ring. After that, it took them like seven years before their next release, 2023's incredible The Offering EP which saw both a thorough overhaul and significant maturation of their sound defined by catchy-ass '77-ish hooks rarely heard in such a rousing manner since the glory years of Dickies, Buzzcocks and Adverts, which would already be more than enough for them to perfectly stand out from the pack but it's actually only half of their appeal here and wouldn't be complete without the equally melodic, elaborate guitar work of front man Jon Garcia and his vicious yet soul- and tuneful singing. A winning formula to which they've stuck ever since and now their second or first longplayer, depending on how you count, feels like the logical culmination of all those years of infectious songcraft, half of it consisting of new material and the other half of kickass new recordings of some of their greatest hits so far, stretching back as far as their aforementioned debut record. The result sounds like a million bucks and as far as straightforward but elegant punk rock with a clear vision goes, i doubt you'll get to hear much better this year. An instant classic if i ever heard one.
Not terribly hard to describe what this Atlanta group is doing on their debut LP as it's basically yet another Crass Discharge of Rudimentary Peni unspooling right in front of us, yet for somthing this straight and specific, they pull this shit off in a thoroughly convincing fashion with plenty of intelligence and variation to their compositions, staying reasonybly close within the expected boundaries of their chosen early hardcore, 1st gen anarcho and death rock frameworks while never repeating themselves and drawing a good deal of fresh energy and surprising turns from the decades-old genre tropes in an effort that strikes me as leagues ahead of your average oldschool genre excercise.
This Richmond, Virginia group's '24 tape Fucking USA already showed the early signs of something worthwhile but their newest EP via Sex Fiend Abomination finally proves what what all the fuss has been about in the first place, as this group strikes me as a breath of freah air breaking up the rampant hardcore comformism signified by a bottomless ocean of fairly oldschool-ish groups that seem to pride themselves on playing really fucking hard yet never fail to bore me to death with their ultra-generic, fatally unimaginative tunes and arrangements. Yankee Bastard refuse to play that game, not by inventing anything particularly new here, but by exhibiting a baseline level of creativity and playfulness that should be the rule rather than the exception in punk, basically enriching every tune with that certain bit of weirdness, a novel idea or a flash of melodic brilliance that reminds you how this music can be grim and angry but really freakin' fun at the same time. And damn, as much as we do need our music to speak the ugly truth, we also desperately need to get some fuckin' joy out of it cos honestly, just reading the news every day is enough of a depressing doom spiral to me right now. It's been said that an integral feature of fascism is an utter failure of the imagination so in turn i expect of punk groups to have some of it instead, 'cos otherwise, you're just wasting my time and attention and i'd rather read more of the news then... at the very least there won't be any boring-ass bland music accompanying it.
Before i forget it, there's been yet another kickass burst of certified not-boring hardcore released on the same day, same label, same city. U.A.V. excell on this one by way of a neat garage-y, KBD-esque basis to their unpretentious, oldschool sound, a neat fuzzy and quite adaptive guitar performance and an unhinged, over-the-top pissed vocal freakshow. It takes so little to stick out of the pack, really... an idea or two basically, the slightest of fucks given to your songs and arrangements and maybe a riff that's not that one stale riff everyone is playing all the time. It's why i've grown increasingly unwilling to engage with anything less in hardcore these days. If you can't do as much, i don't care how fast and hard and tight you're playing your borecore and how freakin' punk you look doing it.
