Cherry Cheeks – Cruel Bore
D.O. & The Bytes releases June 12th via Total Punk Records.
Prisonnier Du Temps – La Liberté S’Obtient Par Le Sang
Prendre Le Pouvoir Par La Force releases May 15th via La Vida Es Un Mus Discos.
Elephant Stone – Everything Evil
Asha releases June 28th.
Holofoil – App
Holofoil releases May 29th via Already Dead Tapes and Records.
Pet Moon – Aquarium
Small releases May 15th via Critter Records..
Andresa One Man Band – Nothing But R’n’R
Nothing But R’N’R releases May 15th.
Techno 666 – River Of Silence
Power Burkas – Pont Del Blanqueig
Verspannungskassette #107 (C-60)
Tracklist
Hand Helds Slop
Snarewaves Prescription
Klint Infects My Veins
Blaskapelle Chancentod Rien Pour Moi
Season 2 Lucky
Eddy Current Suppression Ring I Need Some Space
Mr. [Redacted] Evaporated
Evil Eye Rotting
Smarm Lick The Fist
700 Club Black Iron Prison
Subtle Turnhips Stupid
Agita American Diet
Dumb Posh Hippies Scumbo
Yleiset Syyt Saitte Mitä Halusitte
Götri Check Your Head
Termite Go to Work
Crash Kill The Shill
Mock Execution Defiant Pose
Bequest Threshold Of Hell
Zero Rat Your Future In Ruins
Nourishment Chariot On The Ledge
Tracklist
Five Bucks Metal Fumes Fever
Billiam Mother Marta
Poo Poo Talks Culo Rotto
Couchgagzzz Mighty Dog
Cherry Cheeks Spider
Toilet Rats Heart Emoji Mpls
Matty Grace & The Rumination Year Itsnotfunnyanymore(Nothüskerdü)
Guiding Light Swinging And Stuck
Useless Eaters Contrast
Memo PST Fume With The Shaper
Forcer Make A Case
Shrudd Hammerman
Teksti-TV 666 Kool-Aid Man
Subtle Turnhips – Septentinoriel
In a world of rapidly changing musical hypes and trends and an unrelenting social media promo rat race trying to please an algorithm way more than actual humans, i always get some healing out of watching a band as uncompromising and unfazed by the modern attention economy as these frenchmen, who even predate this blog by over a decade, simply doing whatever the fuck they like for close to a quarter century by now. Accordingly, their seventh LP once again shares all the qualities and quirks you’ve come to love about them over time and nonetheless they stay utterly unpredictable here in their art punk that stays every bit as crude as it’s catchy and nonetheless has plenty of variety and smarts buried under its rough surface too, their possible inspirations spanning from old-timey noise makers á la Half Japanese, The Membranes, Feedtime, The Fall, various old no wave-related or even slightly kraut-ish indulgences to slightly more recent garage punk essentials like the early works of The UV Race and Eddy Current Suppression Ring. But really, it would be unfair at this point to treat Subtle Turnhips as anything less than the unique and uncompromising creative force in their own right they’ve proven to be and this new record too is no less than yet another instant genre classic.
Album-Stream →Forcer – Forcer
Here’s an odd one for you, and i mean that in the most positive sense, coming from a group presumably from Charlotte, North Carolina. The thing starts out as very much of a hardcore record, though even throughout the first couple tunes you can’t help but notice that pronounced spaced-out psychedelic undercurrent and an increasingly catchy, melodic quality as well as some top-notch ability of song construction underneath that really goes into overdrive in the fourth track Misery, after which the record then incrementally slows down the tempo with each track and leans even more into an acid rock-driven post punk, postcore and art punk vibe that reminds me a bit of recent Science Man, Optic Nerve and there’s even a slight bit of LoFi-era Poison Ruin in Make A Case. Inevitably, the record eventually reaches something of a full-on space rock territory yet retains all of these at times subtly emo-fied, melancholic undertones and ist melodic brilliance and you know what, at no point does this group sound much like anything else around really – the best comparison i can come up with for the second half from the top of my head are the likes of recent Shrudd and some of Electric Prawns 2, but really that’s kind of a stretch already. You also may compare the larger-than-life drama of the record’s middle section to Tom Lyngcoln’s Raging Head LP or his more recent band and spiritual successor to that one-off record, Metho. But none of these comparisons truly stick here. This record is freakin’ unique is what i’m sayin’.
Album-Stream →Memo PST – Eternal Actors
This Los Angeles supergroup of sorts (members have previously played in Ex-Cult, Bad Sports, Shark Toys, OBN IIIs and Richard Rose, among others) has been around for a couple years already but i never quite got over the pervasive dad rock vibes (or at the very least a quite dad-ish, middle-of-the-road variety of garage punk) of their previous two records. That new one is a whole different kind of beast altogether though and what may come across as a bit half-hearted and undercooked on previous releases suddenly clicks into razor-sharp focus on this, their second LP via In The Red Records, firing off one catchy-as-fuck killer tune after another, presented in their most flattering light by way of an unrelentingly tight and explosive performance and a high-end, punchy production that only works to add sharp contours to their sound rather than watering it down or sanding off the edges (I’m looking your way, Hymns From The Hills). This is nothing less than a top-tier little time capsule of 2010s-era garage punk you could almost call oldschool again at this point, pulled off with incredible momentum, workmanlike ease and unerring consistency worthy of a bunch of seasoned genre veterans.
Album-Stream →Crash – Crash
This group from Kansas City has hammered together a thoroughly impressive debut Cassette here, available via the local powerhouse Dirtbag Distro, made up of eleven punches of deliciously raggedy and pissed oldschool-ish hardcore. I do think the bandcamp blurb mentioning Minor Threat and Black Flag kinda undersells this record though, which actually comprises of a lot more than just your average retro early ’80s hardcore rehash, keeping things thrilling and unpredictable all the way thanks to tons of neat little quirks and creative brainfarts, enhanced with a constant garage-y, KBD-ish undercurrent and pulling it all off in a way that to me feels as much in conversation with the weirder end of the more contemporary hardcore spectrum as it certainly is with the ancient classics and as far as those are concerned, there’s always a peculiar, eccentric quality to these tunes and an offbeat layer of dissonant noise that often reminds me way more more of oddities of the Gray Matter, Flipper and Really Red variety (though i do get the Germs comparison), rather than the usual suspects of old.
Album-Stream →Billiam – Open Comma Vault
Billiam, busy as ever, has just recently blessed us with a new lathe cut 5″ on Low Ambition Records and there’s also a new LP waiting to drop sometime via Erste Theke Tonträger. Before that though, we get this neat odds-and-ends compilation of outtakes, compilation tracks, alternate versions… you know the drill. Some of it you may have heard before in one form or another, some you probably didn’t but one thing’s for sure: Many players in the current garage punk field would be willing to sell their kidneys for these quality scraps and leftovers conveniently compiled on yet another kickass LP.
Album-Stream →Agita – Commercial
Here’s another strange artifact of peculiar yet also kinda catchy noise rock and postcore delirium for connoisseurs of rough and unwieldy noise. Agita are a group from Philadelphia and their third EP, just released on cassette by local label Strange Mono, unleashes upon us fifteen attacks of a crude ruckus mostly less than one minute long that reminds me as much of early proto noise rockers á la Flipper, No Trend or even slightly of very early Rudimentari Peni as it does of more recent noisy oddities like Soupcans, Soft Shoulder, making for twelve delightful minutes of cluttered, chaotic noise held im place by reassuringly rigid and seamlessly integraded supporting structures, hammered home in an unrelenting performance that ain’t pulling any punches here.
Album-Stream →