On their 5th longplayer, a good ten years into their tenure, the San Francisco group comes across as the most focused they've sounded in a long while with much of the fat trimmed off their tunes in their unmistakable amalgamation of catchy-ass eighties college- and nineties indie rock with added elements of jangle pop and shoegaze-y moments that remind me of Swervedriver more than any of the usual genre suspects; pitchfork-era millenial whimsy being coupled with an unexpected sense of earnesty that feels more at home in the golden late-'80s/early-'90s indie rock era. What sounds more like yet another oldschool indie flashback on paper, this group has absolutely made this shit their own over the years. I won't ever forgive them for the title track though, the only true miss on this record as we're well beyond the age where i could tolerate any amount of obvious on-the-nose auto tune, no matter how tongue-in-cheek you go about it 'cos that kind of joke had already gone stale like twenty years ago. Don't do that anymore please. Just don't, 'cos i just can't.
Little Chair of Durham, North Carolina have already put out at least two previous EPs and a split with Tractor Beam and i'll say yeah, these are already perfectly pleasant artifacts of timeless mid-'80s to ealy '90s jangle- and indie pop but things really come together on their newest mini-LP with a tighter, more powerful set of underlying tunes, the arrangements and performance being equally purged of excess slack here for a record that kinda bridges the gap between like the early Sarah Records era, noisy & melodic late '80s college rock side-effects á la Vomit Launch and also some bits of '90s indie rock á la Seam, Unrest, Archers Of Loaf. Anyway, this is some ridiculously appealing shit right here.
This NYC group has been around for a good while actually even though they only really caught my eye with their excellent 2024 Zinger LP, which channeled the common aesthetics of their looser, scrappier-feeling previous works into a more coherent and exciting package. Their newest EP continues on that same pleasantly anachronistic trajectory mixing fuzzy garage punk with lots of late-'80s to mid-'90s College-/Indie Rock- and (proto-)Grunge-informed shredding, even though the too-disjointed-for-its-own-good quality of the second tune Cutie - putting in way too little connective tissue to truly breathe life in this disfigured tiny creature - really threw me off for a moment. Anyway, everthing following that feels a lot more organic and sensible here and if that certain brand of oldschool slacker punk is your kind of jam, this is yet another worthy jolt of energy for ya!
Last Year's Epoxy River and Super Pool LP by this Evesham, New Jersey (presumably one-man-) group was already such a massive leap in quality for them and yet again, they manage to considerably refine their sound on this newest LP, on which they kinda leave behind the late-2000s fuzz punk and noise pop ingredients that dominated that record and lean even more into the oldschool '80s and '90s college- and indie rock-informed sounds ranging from classic Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh, Bitch Magnet and early Seam to the likes of Superchunk and Polvo, with just a subtle hint of first and second wave emo thrown in for good measure but also increasing amounts of '80s hardcore-based proto-noise rockers like Flipper, Big Black, Drunks With Guns and No Trend, especially in the final stretch of the record. There's an unpredictable quality and an explosive, uncontainable energy to these tunes, radiating the pure untamed joy of blasting a euphoric and abrasive, larger-than-life and kinda anachronistic type of melodic noise out of your gear that feels pleasantly out-of-place in this era, all of it further thrown deliciously off-balance by the ear-piercing screams that prove this dude still ain't ready to half-ass anything here.
Not too long after their already quite joyous third EP, the Kalamazoo, Michigan group is already following up on that with an even stronger 2-track digital single that once again feels like a throwback to the glory days of '80s-to-mid-'90s post punk, college-, indie- and alternative rock with the likes of Mission Of Burma, My Dad Is Dead, Sebadoh or Volcano Suns looming large over the opening track Party Store, while Good People sounds a bit like Flipper or Broken Talent filtered through a more approachable early Mudhoney- or mid-'90s Royal Trux vibe.
