Typically excellent new fodder from some of my favorite post punk weirdos. The first track Optimism on this new Cassingle by the Cleveland, Ohio group encapsulates all the hallmarks of their angular brand of post punk into a compact and super-catchy little package while Foot Of Pride is a somewhat more ambitious, sprawling affair which – with its mid-tempo pace and uncharactaristically expansive length of over five minutes – still doesn’t ever come close to overstaying its welcome thanks to its understated but effective slow-burn dramaturgy and a performance every bit as sharp and precise as anything this one-of-a-kind group has done before.
Eight explosive bursts of equally rough and smart, inventive and versatile hardcore punk are what we’re in for on this californian group’s debut EP, which on one hand bears some similarity to such oldschool-HC-meets-garage-punk groups like Strutter, Headcheese, early Electric Chair, Insane Urge and Necron 9 but then fuses that aesthetic with the unpredictability and structured chaos of more quirky out-of-the-box thinking groups á la Mystic Inane, Cucuy, Acrylics, Big Bopper and Rolex.
Dallax, Texas punks Thyroids have been fucking around with different styles and vibes for quite a few years already but they really started to hit their stride with last year’s excellent EP Toppings and Droppings. Now, for their first full LP, they’ve once again shaken up and diversified their sound considerably, with only traces left of the heavy synth punk leanings of the predecessor. The opening track ABCs of Assimilation delights with a variation on angular post-meets-garage punk shit á la Reality Group, Uranium Club, Exit Group and also quite a bit of Skull Cult – even more so in tunes like Static/Dynamic or The New Poor, which also have a bit of an undeniable Knowso vibe to them. The Loot and Don’t Ask, Dumbass are no-frills borderline-hardcore gut punches. Daily Habits reimagines the group in a somewhat egg-ish guise while Enterview and Suited & Tied have something of a math-y postcore edge, vaguely reminiscent of the likes of Big Bopper, Rolex, Brandy or Mystic Inane. Check Engine Light conjures up some oldschool Useless Eaters or Ex-Cult energy. Cop Out is a hyper-focused and compact garage smasher getting maximum mileage out of an old-fashioned riff and the closing tune !!! Click Now To Claim Your Reward !!! once again goes all-in on the afrementioned Skull Cult and Uranium Club vibes to utterly hypnotic results.
I gotta admit, after very much enjoying their 2019 debut EP, i had some serious difficulty warming up in particular to the 2023 Big Mess LP by this Brighton group which complied a bit too rigidly for my taste to the hip, ultra-processed middle-of-the-road formula of current british post punk chic, complete with its just-a-bit-too-slick production style, overuse of polyrhythmic leads and appregios, annoying zoomer count-your-syllables sprechgesang – ya know, not the most original building blocks these days. Their newest longplayer is a whole different beast altogether though, having regained much the group’s previous edge and at times an almost postcore and noise rock-ish energy being poured into tunes that sound organically developed and whole this time – rather than forced, artificially cobbled together, processed and quantized within an inch of their life in a pro tools post production hell. No, this here is clearly the sound of a capable band being somehow shocked out of their complacency, a breathing, pulsing organism propelled forward with considerable momentum by real righteous anger while the tunes themselves are the most soundly and carefully composed and balanced we’ve heard of them so far, the synths being another subject of further refinement, sounding more properly anchored and seamlessly embedded than ever before on this record, which overall reminds me of a number of pretty diverse groups á la Beef, Dr. Sure’s Unusual Practice, Broken Prayer, Wristwatch and Patti, among many others.
Reactivated old-timey australian punk veterans The Vacant Lot have a new 7″ out on Iron Lung Records and it’s a special one in multiple ways – to begin with, these are a bunch of formerly lost classics written in ’78-’79, now pulled from their stash of unrecorded gems and given a proper new recording for the first time. The current incarnation of the band has Ausmutents and Alien Nosejob front magician Jake Robertson handling the guitar, who also appears to share production duties with another indespensable central piller of the australien garage punk scene, Mikey Young and oh boy does it show, resulting in a record whose sound kinda encapsulates the best of both worlds, the quirky energy of a vibrant contemporary scene just as much as the playful catchyness of first-wave DIY punk.
Not too long after their brilliant debut EP we already get to hear the first full LP of this Minneapolis group which still delights with a pleasantly old-fashioned genre mixture that primarily appears to take inspiration from the more left-field and melancholy edges of ’80s -’90s post punk, hard- and postcore history, although the influences are a lot more varied here with the opening song Hello World having a strong ’90s Dischord vibe somewhat reminiscent of the likes of Jawbox, Crownhate Ruin, Bluetip, Smart Went Crazy or Kerosene 454 while Tectonic Plates comes across like a curious mixture of Rapeman, Brainiac and Mule. Kick Geneva and Steve remind me a lot of Angst and Moving Targets, BDFI has some Butthole Surfers-esque doominess and it’s not before the second-to-last track, the instrumental What Happens Next and the subsequent Mantle, that those Mission Of Burma influences – which were more strongly present on the EP – kick into full gear once again. Anyway, through much of the record, there’s a slightly folk-ish undercurrent goin’ on aswell that further calls to mind such eighties US groups like The Proletariat, Volcano Suns, M.I.A. and My Dad Is Dead.
That Evinspragg record has garnered the most publicity of the newest Inscrutable Records batch for several reasons, some of them justifiable, others more annoyingly drama-related. But to be perfectly honest, that one is a bit too ambitious for its own good in my humble opinion and a bit of a mixed bag which starts out incredibly strong, then kinda fizzles out towards the end and i actually feel much more drawn towards the label’s other two releases among which is this full-length debut by Johnny Skin. On it, they create a dreamy, melancholy and super-catchy melange blending the yearning vibe of ’50s-’60s bubblegum pop ballads with rudimetary, minimalist lo-fi vintage electronic drum beats and synths in a fashion that’s gonna draw inevitable comparisons to Suicide and Métal Urbain, interspersed with a bunch of more noisy and dissonant no wave-ish tunes more in the vein of noisy synth punk pioneers á la Primitive Calculators or Nervous Gender and the experimental, psychedelic sounds of Theoretical Girls, Chrome or MX-80.
This group from Olympia, Washington has always been an exquisite thrill ride with their two previous EPs and an LP, all of which came out via the reliably excellent cassette label Impotent Fetus. Following a vinyl reissue of said LP via Sorry State Records, that very same label now presents us with their second album and as expected, their hyperactive mix of art- and garage punk, hard- and postcore is yet another delightfully overwhelming assault on the senses equally unpredictable, smart and elaborate, somewhat reminiscent of old left-field hardcore acts like Tragic Mulatto (most strikingly in Failed Experiment), Really Red and Saccharine Trust on one hand but just as related to more recent phenomena like Mystic Inane, Warm Bodies, Launcher, Vexx, Rolex, Cucuy or Big Bopper.
These croatian punks didn’t take long to completely win me over with their joyous and odd garage punk mixture of cowpunk-y X (US) and Gun Club vibes, Angst-ish folk punk sprinkles and tons of early Minutemen-esque, freewheeling anything-goes funky post punk weirdnes that also calls to mind a wild bunch of contemporary acts like Ismatic Guru, Patti, Tyvek, Print Head and Shark Toys, while the the sort-of-theme-tune Dad Joke almost feels like an authentic throwback to old DIY brits á la Mekons, Television Personalities and Desperate Bicycles.
I can’t ever have enough snooper tunes in my life so this new tour EP is more than welcome even if it feels like a little bit of a cheat, consisting only like 60% of actual new songs while the other 40% are made up of two rather inessential instances of experimentation and fucking around. The two “actual” tunes are high-octane rippers though, driven by electric beats a bit like we’ve kinda already heard in the track Subdivision from their 2022 Town Topic EP, although the energy level here is almost brutal in direct comparison, catapulting their sound into some straight electro punk territory with the songs themselves striking me as pretty classic, first-rate Snooper material. Now if these folks just could make up their minds to actually play a show or two in the western parts of germany on their next tour, that would make me a very happy boy. There are egg punk afficinados living in places other than Berlin, you know…
