Some dude from Bloomington, Indiana has created an insanely appealing debut mini-LP here, standing with one leg in egg-ish garage- and the other in DIY art punk territory, with the egg-ishness getting increasingly toned down over the course of the record which really helps these tunes evade the looming eggpunk fatigue that even someone as historically sympathetic towards the genre as me often struggles to overcome in recent times. Well, this record does avoid most of the genre’s clichés, common piffalls and shortcomings and indeed its much rawer sound compared to many contempory acts rather reminds me of the earlier 2010s formative era of the genre and specifically the Bloomington connection would suggest the likes of Skull Cult as a primary inspiration. Anyway, add to that a number of killer tunes á la 5:43 p.m., Giving Up and OCD and you get a debut that manages to punch leagues above its weight and really stands on its own in an overcrowded genre landscape.
Allow me to be blunt here, the opening track on this new EP, while not terrible by any means, ain’t among the brightest things the Oakland group has done so far and strikes me as just a bit below their own standards, carrying some of the unfortunate tells of kinda average, lazy post punk song construction based on a random succession of bog-standard riffs and genre tropes and to make matters worse, the most unimaginative use of polyrhythm appregios in the finale just really rubs me the wrong way in a song whose cluttered parts just won’t quite add up in the first place. Thankfully, everything else on their new EP feels a lot more well thought-out and inspired with the remaining five tunes showing all the elegance and intricacy in songwriting and arrangements we’ve come to appreciate from these veterans in the contemporary post punk field, whose 2024 LP Read The Air still saw them considerably upping their game almost a decade into their work. This new one now seems to strike a bit of a middle ground between that record’s careful balance and the immediacy of their earier work and i’m all here for it… i just wish that first tune wasn’t so clumsy and utterly skippable.
A steady trickle of new tunes on their bandcamp page already suggested that something new was coming our way from this indispensable pillar of the 2010s garage punk scene, yet it still feels very much out of the blue the way this new LP, their first after roughly a decade, got unceremoniously dropped on bandcamp digitally without warning, a vinyl release via Total Punk to follow sometime later. Also there’s the question hanging over this, after their triumphant return as a touring act last year, as to how much Useless Eaters are actually functioning as a band on this record as there’s this heavily electronic, homegrown quality to these recordings, making heavy use of classic dub production techniques, synths and sampled drums and an otherwise quite guitar-centric sound that kinda suggests this is Seth Sutton fucking around in the studio solo. Not that it matters much. This is a fascinating record presenting an otherworldly mirror version of Useless Eaters, quite familiar in many aspects but also a bit of a reimagining of their sound, very much unlike anything they’ve done before in its abstract, cold abrasiveness, a distinct industrial feel to these tunes that exceeds even the most out-there moments of in their previous discography.
Just as unexpected came the release a couple days earier by G2K, a group which i think is a collaboration between Sutton and Sal Go of Washington group Sexfaces. Anyway, these four tunes act as a neat companion piece to the Useless Eaters record, sharing quite a bit of its production aesthetics but otherwise dabbling in a way more raw and primitive oldschool garage-, art- and proto punk-influenced sound enveloped in that familiar layer of spaced-out haze.
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.
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’.
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.
Shrudd from Louisville, Kentucky already have been a more than notable presence in the garage punk scene for a while but they really hit it out of the ballpark with their first longplayer No Man Is Good Three Times from last winter, leaving behind much of their humble eggpunk beginnings for a more fleshed-out, sophisticated sound very much on the psychedelic, spaced-out side of the garage- and post punk spectrum. A tough record to follow really, but with their first substantial release since then (leaving aside that silly christmas single from late last year) they’re doing a perfect job at that with two flawless new rippers in the previously established sonic spectrum of elaborate and kinda elegant post-/garage punk vaguely in the neighborhood of such groups as Mononegatives, Useless Eaters, Institute, Corker, Marbled Eye, Tube Alloys or Electric Prawns 2, but also very much their own thing really.
I was intrigued when the Brisbane-based label Grog Records (re-)issued the Hello, Mr. Operator EP by New York electro punks Hand Helds on cassette, originally released late last year. A closer look at their bandcamp profile reveals not only that they’ve had a new EP out in January already but also that quite obviously they’ve been at it for a while already, churning out a ton of EPs in a varying spectrum of dark and noisy garage punk, minimalist and often quite harsh synth- and electro punk. I’m pretty sure i already came across them in the past but i’m also reminded why i passed over that stuff back then, as much of their earlier cataloque sounds like the equivalent of throwing lots of shit at the wall to see what’s gonna stick. Anyway, a couple of things have stuck apparetly and on their latest two EPs, things click into place way more tightly thanks to a more minimalist and deliberate less-is-more approach. Hello Mr. Operator is certainly the cruder of the two EPs with a heavily Primitive Calculators and occasionaly Suicide-indebted brand of Synth Punk minimalism. The Transatlantic Death Machine EP then trades in the bass guitar for live drums and things get even wilder and, dare i say, kinda sophisticated, despite the best efforts and dissonant patterns of synth cacophony in tunes like Glue Tongue to obscure the fact. There’s a weird kraut-ish, motorik quality to the whole thing and a successful approach of trimming the fat while giving attention to the details that matter, all of which positions these two records a couple notches above your average electro-kraut effort or no wave-ish ’80s synth punk throwback.
You could easily file these swiss dudes away as yet another artifact of kinda fashionable, Pisse-induced german-language post punk but this stuff is operating on a high level and standing very much on its own two feet with enough identity and ideas of their own to set them apart with a sound that strikes me as just a tad more international, with Rien Pour Moi reminding me a bit of the likes of Ismatic Guru or Landowner for example, while Animal Farm has a bit of an old Giorgio Murderer Vibe. Anyway, even if they won’t be able to shake off that Pisse comparisons just yet, this is a neat and excellent debut EP in its own right and i can’t wait to see where they’ll go from here.
The early teaser tracks for the debut longplayer of this Melbourne group featuring members of Piss Wizard and Stray Dogs To Good Homes had already signaled kind of a drastic departure from the simple Wipers-infused garage punk of their previous EP and indeed this record is a different beast altogether, taking on more of a dusty, americana-tinged post punk vibe with echoes of eighties Scientists but also plenty of more recent stuff like the noisy post punk of Copenhagen’s Lower and the early works of Iceage; Sklitakling and Pleaser from Sweden, americana- and cowpunk-influenced US groups like Weak Signal and Bambara, or Australia’s own Optic Nerve and Refedex. A rich tapestry of plausible, well-established influences to draw from for sure but these folks absolutely make it their own with tons of resilient song substance providing the foundation to expand upon for their noisy eruptions, determined performances, a fully matching vehicle of haunting sonics for the frank, urgent lyrics and vocals of frontwoman Freya Tanks.
