Nourishment’s past two releases have been on kinda shaky ground in terms of song material in my opinion but anyway, on their newest one, they’re really hitting the nail on the head again with a batch of new tunes that deliver the familiar thrills way more consistently and artfully and for now, i’ll still say they’ve carved out a micro-niche very much of their own with both their compositions and atmosphere having way more in common with ancient death rock and contemporary post punk influences than anything currently happening in the wider blackened/dungeon punk landscape.
Not terribly hard to describe what this Atlanta group is doing on their debut LP as it’s basically yet another Crass Discharge of Rudimentary Peni unspooling right in front of us, yet for somthing this straight and specific, they pull this shit off in a thoroughly convincing fashion with plenty of intelligence and variation to their compositions, staying reasonybly close within the expected boundaries of their chosen early hardcore, 1st gen anarcho and death rock frameworks while never repeating themselves and drawing a good deal of fresh energy and surprising turns from the decades-old genre tropes in an effort that strikes me as leagues ahead of your average oldschool genre excercise.
Portland death rockers Excess Blood’s 2024 self-titled EP on Impotent Fetus was pretty fucking good already and on their recent follow-up, they sorta stick even closer to a pretty oldschool goth/post punk/death rock formula, so much that in the first seconds of Turn To Stone you’d almost think they’re about to segue right into a cover Joy Division’s Transmission. Usually that kind of thing doesn’t sound like the most attractive proposition to me on paper, but i gotta admit even the most traditional sounding records of that ilk aren’t all created equal and the devil is in the details really. On this one, all those details add up admirably – the tunes, the vibes, the performance and attitude, it’s all perfectly on point here, making for a record that sounds kinda old-fashioned but, unlike so many similar bands, not the least bit dull or stale.
This is the third release already in just a couple months by this blackened-/dungeon punk act frome wherever in the US and just like its predecessors it’s yet another first-rate addition to the microgenre which approaches the stylistic signifiers of black metal from an uncommon post punk- and death rock angle to create a sound that’s in equal measure atmospheric, dense and layered while blasting a respectable crater in their own little patch of spooky dark forest all the same.
Excellent garage-leaning horror punk from yet another Minneapolis group. I gotta admit i wasn’t too thrilled at first as directionless is probably the right word to describe the opening track Lobotomized of their first long-playing effort, but thankfully after that, they quickly find their footing with pretty much everything that follows being on a different level altogether as flourishes of eighties early goth- and death rock collide with elements of early west coast punk and hardcore, plus riffs and solos straight out of the ’70s metal and motörpunk playbook in an inventive and tight-as-fuck explosion of highly addictive hooks.
Oslo group Molbo sure have made some waves recently with their two cassettes in 2023/’24 which got a huge boost when they got reissued together on vinyl earlier this year via Erste Theke Tonträger. Their overall sound hasn’t changed considerably since then but nonetheless there’s plenty of refinement evident here, consolidating their style into a more robust and consistent whole while once again weaving threads of garage-, post- and egg punk, death rock and dungeon punk into a pretty fucking inventive and gloriously deformed genre bastard, fortifying and defending their own little niche in the contemporary egg/dungeon canon.
Now i suddenly remember that, like, two weeks ago, i was thrilled as hell to see a new Nourishment EP being released and then apparently failed to bookmark it and forgot about it in the last couple weeks’ relentless flood of new releases. Happens to me all the time. Well, better late the never i guess. The sonic parameters on this one stay roughly the same for the US-based blackened-/dungeon punk group, althought the production values appear to have been improved a tiny bit here. As before, the new record captivates with a distinct spin on the genre that once again appears to take plenty of inspiration from contemporary, dark goth-infused post punk and oldschool death rock.
Incredible new Dungeon Punk-related material from a mysterious group operating out of some unspecified dark forest located somewhere in the US. These folks approach the whole blackened punk thing from a heavily post punk- and goth/death rock-leaning angle, shrouding their fully developed, well-rounded song architecture in a beautifully fucked-up, blown-out Lo-Fi aesthetic, altogether reminding me of a couple of fairly recent genre entries by the likes of Conifère, Unsheather and Bloody Keep.
The 2020 debut EP of this spanish-singing swedish group still fit in (maybe a bit too) well with what i’d probably have described as your typical hardcore- and death rock-adjacent “dark punk” fare in the prior decade, though the 2021 split tape with Iceland’s genre mainstay Dauðyflin showed some steady progress already. Now, with their newest mini-LP, i’m gonna say they’re finally reaching peak performance and beginning to transcend their kinda restrictive genre surroundings with a bunch of new tunes that – though not actually inventing anything new here – tweak the genre’s basic nuts and bolts to absolute perfection in a breathless succession of immaculately built bursts of death and despair that keep things thrilling and interesting from start to finish, a quality that sadly has become a bit of a rarity in that particular niche.
The debut full-length cassette of this group from Greater Sudbury, Ontario delivers, at first glance, fairly conventional but also perfectly well constructed and effective post punk smashers with slight anarcho and death rock undercurrents, although the more obvious comparisons here would be such genre powerhouses as Criminal Code, Sievehead, Schedule 1, Sudbury’s very own Kommissars and, more recently, Negative Gears. But then again, there’s an even more uncanny similarity to Vancouver group Dead Cells, who had a pretty fucking great LP out via Erste Theke in 2018 and whose lead singer’s voice also bears a striking resemblence to this… dare i say there even might be an ever-so-slim chance this is the same dude? I’m probably wrong though.
