I gotta say i'm more than delighted with the versatile and smart and weird ways in which garage punk has evolved over more recent years but, you know, sometimes i'm just craving for something more oldschool and primal. Detroit duo 208's new cassette on Painters Tapes does a fabulous job scratching that particular itch, containing the raw, primitive, sweaty and drunken blues variety of garage punk, the kind you need to have a soul but no brain to appreciate. Yeah, i'm aware that the soul is a purely religious construct that has zero evidence going for it in real life. So let's say instead that you need a broken soulful brain to appreciate it, or something like that, okay?. The fidelity of this is just perfect, the kind of production where heavy clipping both digital and analog is a feature, not a bug - a fuzz-saw mangler of jams which might evoke comparisons to mostly older shit like Oblivians, Gories, Pussy Galore, Feedtime, Reatards and whatnot.
The spanish garage scene is full of gold lately (and speaking of el diablo… have you all heard that fabulous Hogar LP yet?) - latest piece of evidence is this nice little EP by a group from… Barcelona, i guess? At least that's one of the few words i'm able to recognise in their lyrics. They're playing a fun variety of garage punk that mostly alternates between straight and stupid '77-ish simplicity and a more contemporary, angular groove á la Uranium Club, Pinch Points.
