Gnats – In My City
Verspannungskassette #101 (C-60)
Tracklist
Unsubscriber Hallways
Midwestern Medicine Credit Line
Sunny Bear Forest Police Kar
Twisted Teens Pack Of Jokers
Imploders Bloodstains On The Big Screen
Oolskunrahod Vengador
Active Service Shoot First
Stupid World Poor & Divided
Citric Dummies Grant Richardson's Burning Wreckage Welcome Home
Gare Du Nord The Flame
No Time State Execution
Gnats In My City
Завірюга Гулять
Snarewaves Poltergeist
Sprgrs Me Han Robado Otra Vez
Speed Week Tragic Creature
Cheap Fix Soul Tune
Gus Baldwin Cherrywood
Gold Cup The Piss Has Been Taken
Tracklist
Liiek Myth
TGRX Regulated
Glueman Disposer
Baby Tyler The Pressure
Gonies Circuit Fatigue
Sklitakling De stopper ikkje
Perfil Bajo No cuela
Liquid Cross Don't Think
Teenage Tom Petties Teenage Thin Lizzies
Missed Cues Like I Was Nothing
Greg Wheeler and the Poly Mall Cops Violent Hues
Power Pants I'm Not The Best
The Smarthearts One on One
Minot Walls
Liiek – Living In A Fiction
After their previous LP, though pretty fucking good already, still sounded a bit like stereotypical Berlin post punk on autopilot in some places, their second album (or third maybe, depending on what length you actually consider an LP) considerably widens their stylistic breadth and feels way more deliberately crafted and well thought through in comparison, imbuing their repetitive grooves with a heightened sense of feverish urgency while still calling to mind a number of primarily Berlin based groups like Pigeon, Pretty Hurts, Glaas, early Diät, Clock of Time or Exit Group.
Album-Stream →Greg Wheeler and the Poly Mall Cops – Slimephone Surveillance
The Des Moines, Iowa group already have an EP and a pretty neat first LP under their belt but i don't remember them ever ripping as hard as they do now on their sophomore album, sporting a sound that in parts feels pleasantly antiquated at this point, kinda as it these guys got stuck in a time loop around the mid-aughts to early '2010s garage punk era and they have the bottomless well of catchy-ass tunes and explosive performances to make that shit stick.
Album-Stream →Liquid Cross – Don’t Think
Right away the debut EP of this group based in Eugene, Oregon radiates a vibe reminding me of a number of short-lived noisy and melodic punk groups from the early 2010s like Milk Music, Fins and Dharma Dogs as well as the fairly recent bands Jolana Star and Psychic Dogs who seem determined to revive that timeless sound of borderline post punk-ish catchy punk tunes paying tribute to the eighties Homestead, SST Records and Touch & Go eras. So now you can add Liquid Cross to that list but also, there's a notable hint of early-days Protomartyr present here, most notably their second and third LPs, in no small part due to the singer's voice channeling a weary and melancholic quality quite similar to Protomartyr's Joe Casey.
Album-Stream →Gold Cup – The Piss Has Been Taken
Manchester's Gold Cup have already accumulated a number of notable EPs over the past couple years but in my book they really struck yellow for the first time with their newest golden shower of hits that is their fourth EP, walliowing in a sleazed-up hard-rockin' garage punk sound that seems to channel kind of a Golden Pelicans energy while in tunes like opener Zero Percent and closing tune King Crab, they refine the formula with faint echoes of oldschool AmRep-Style noise rock and a subtle hint of 90s postcore. Stuck On Repeat on the other hand is a catchy-as-hell borderline powerpop-ish tune of the highest caliber and The Piss Has Been Taken reminds me of another quite yellow jet of a band, Australia's own Pist Idiots.
Album-Stream →No Time – Comply Or Die // Gare Du Nord – Appels De Phares
Awesome new shit from Basque Country-based label Mendeku Diskak. First off there's a new EP of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania group Iron Breed on which they serve four delicious treats of catchy garage-flavored Oi! shit with an oldschool strummy power pop-ish quality to boot. The debut EP of Gare Du Nord, a group of somewhat nebulous international origin then feels a bit like the more rough and old-fashioned flipside to that same thing as they churn out no-frills catchy tunes with both a distinct '77 and eighties europunk flavor, kinda as if the current breed of french and belgian garage/oi!/post punk groups went all-in on their original inspiration.
Album-Stream →Sprgrs – Poligono Industrial
For the last three years or so, Sprgrs of Granada, Spain have been an ever-present mainstay at the upper-mid tier of contemporary eggpunk groups and while they seem seem perfectly content with that status, reproducing the genre's basic ingredients with workmanlike consistency, it should also have become abundantly clear that these dudes came to stay and ain't going anywhere anytime soon. I'm fine with that, as there's still pleny of fun to be had with their music even if the day may never come on which they finally transcend the genre's self-imposed limitations. It's a very burger-and-fries type of record and sometimes you're just craving for ecactly that kind of musical junk food..
Album-Stream →Party Dozen – Mad Rooter
Mad Rooter / Ghost Rider releases November 19th via Grupo.
Onyon – Molasses
Pale Horses releases November 11th via Mangel Records.
Bee Bee Sea – You
Stanzini Can Be Allright releases November 21st via Wild Honey Records.
Streets Of Separation – Motorbike
Faux Fur releases November 3rd via Helta Skelta Records.
Turbogoblin RX – Turbogoblin RX & The Letters From The Underworld
These australians' 2023 mini-LP was tons of weird-ass dungeon- and fantasy-themed fun already and their newest longplayer has an even stronger batch of headsplitting tunes made up of elements of garage-, synth- and post punk that right out of the gate delights with a distinct flavor of vintage Useless Eaters and Ausmuteants action in the opening track Pillager, complemented with a note of psych-/acid Punk á la Pow! in Moneyman while Big Hat - one of two holdovers first heard on their 2021 Mammon Machine EP - has a bit of a Strange Attractor vibe and Dopaminer may easily fool you into thinking it's an exceptionally strong Why Bother? tune. Further, i can imagine friends of the likes of slightly more dungeon-flavored like Curta'n Wall or Oslo's own eggpunks Molbo getting a kick outta this shit.
Album-Stream →Citric Dummies – Split With Turnstile
This is a great week to channel your inner basic punk bitch as at least three out of the four records i'm posting today aren't exactly gonna win any awards for innovation and originality but make up for it by sheer competence in songwriting and determined sledgehammer performances. And so does this new Citric Dummies Record (which is exactly as much a split record as Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass was a Hüsker Dü record and Die Nasty had any Rikk Agnew on it), which pretty much perfects the group's formula combining lots of Dead Boys energy with some Rocket From The Tombs and Death-informed proto punk flourishes, some pre-Rollins Black Flag- and Bad Brains-ish early hardcore punk to a highly flammable concoction that, despite inspiring all that retro name dropping, manages to feel weirdly contemporary.
Album-Stream →