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.
The old 12XU spotify playlist is long dead, so now i'm undertaking a second, more serious attempt with songs roughly divided into three playlists of new shit, older crap and classic diarrhea. Since the spotify catalogue appears to improve over time - more than half the songs i imported were available this time, hurrah! - this might even start to make a bit of sense.
To start with, this is based on an automatic import of 12XU Radio's playlists, which i then tried to purge of false matches. So please be prepared for a few duplicates, redundancies and other scary stuff i might have missed.
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.
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.
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.
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.