Now here’s some excellent new garage-/synth-/post punk shit that’s only tangentially egg-related but certainly a good bit Devo-fied nonetheless and best of all, pretty versatile and casually shapeshifting in its sonic parameters, as a result reminding me of an appropriately eclectic bunch of groups like Checkpoint, Kitchen People, Ghoulies, Fungas, Cherry Cheeks, Ausmuteants, early Powerplant, Electric Prawns 2 and Dr. Sure’s Unusual Practice.
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Here’s yet another kickass Billiam record once again delivering the goods of quirky-ass egg-ish garage punk in four tunes that nicely balance the comfortably familiar with, as always, plenty of novel ideas and unexpected detours. To me the absolute standout here are the pulsating post punk grooves of Planned Obsolescence but New Wave is an absolute wrecker too. Essential Feedstock Oils feel a bit like a welcome throwback to the very early days of Billiam and it’s just as glorious seeing Robbie Thunders’ 2023 insta-classic Houston We Have Rock being given its due in an absolutely vigorous cover rendition.
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Excellent new shit, the debut EP of this Nottingham, UK group whose style feels kinda fluid, evading categorization as a whole even if the isolated components feel fairly familiar, the most immediately striking ones being the eggpunk-related eccentricities of Snooper, early Skull Cult, Busted Head Racket, Clarko on one hand and the considerably rougher weirdness of Warp, Beef, Scud on the other while at times even approaching the unpredictable off-the-rails eclecticism of Pressure Pin, Checkpoint or TY.
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After six years silence, out of the blue comes the second 7″ of this Antwerp, Belgium group via the local garage punk powerhouse Belly Butten Records. And oh boy, this is some heavy duty shit channeling an aesthetic that seems just as influenced by smart artsy garage punk groups á la Uranium Club, Vintage Crop, Reality Group as by the sprechgesang and eleborate arrangements of US postcore phenomenon Straw Man Army, even if lyrically this shit is a lot more lighthearted here, in-tune with the overall musical vibe. To round things out, there’s also a distinct touch of Tyvek or UV Race progressively creeping in over the course of these four tunes. I think this is just a perfect little 7″. So ready for the next one in another in six years.
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First-rate new catchy garage punk shit from Sydney that cycles through quite a few different styles in its four songs with POSIWID and the opening tune What A Time To Be Alive coming across a bit like a mix between the fuzzy power pop of Sex Mex and the quirky synth-enhanced egg-ish action of Ghoulies while the synth punk of The Game recalls oldschool Digital Leather material and more recent stuff like Spyroids and O-D-EX. The closing track B-52’s Tattoo on the other hand sounds like something right out of the warped mind of Texas garage punk eccentric Trashdog. Oh wait, there’s yet another dog band i’m thinking of here… Oh right, that’s Melbourne’s wonderfully trashy garage-/synth punk explosion Metdog!
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Winky Frown have been kind of an oddity right from the start even in the – by definition – quite odd eggpunk genre in that their songs on one hand seem to perfectly fit in with a number of thoroughly established eggpunk formulas yet never fail to surprise and transcend the genre’s limitations, putting a lot more effort, ideas and songwriting finesse into their tunes than you’d usually expect. Their new digital 2-track single has yet another surprise in store for us when we’re greeted with a slow-jam tune kinda channelling a lost artifact of Chairs Missing-era Wire in turn channeling a lost artifact of Syd Barret-era Pink Floyd and the best thing is that shit fucking works! The second tune Upside Down Frown then is closer to the sonics we’re used to from the group, which is to say: another marvellously crafted high-momentum electrically driven garage punk smasher that unrelentingly builds up towards a massive payoff.
I’m a bit short on time this week so here’s just a quick digest of quirky punk releases with varying degrees of egg-ish-ness of which these three particularly stuck out to me.
For starters, there are the comparatively rough sounds of Athens, Georgia group Mr. [Redacted] whose tunes rapidly alternate between the parameters of a hard-/art-/weirdcore sound not entirely dissimilar to groups like Judy & The Jerks, Warm Bodies, Sniffany & The Nits, and the more egg-intensive sounds of early Snooper, Print Head, Awful and early Skull Cult.
If you’re more interested in classic egg punk territory, you may get tons of enjoyment out of the new Tape by Lovebomb from Hildesheim, Germany (man, the krautwürstle are really punching above their weight this week, aren’t they?), wo deliver a densly packed bundle of snappy textbook eggpunk goodness most similar to shit á la Prison Affair, Beer, Winky Frown, Molbo and Goblin Daycare.
If you prefer it more weird and Lo-Fi, try the new one of Leipzig (again!) group TTTTurbo whose recorded output’s overall aesthetic is the sonic equivalent of an n-th generation document that’s been xeroxed a couple times too many – beneath a thick layer of burnt monochrome pixels and copy-of-a-copy xerographic grime there’s plenty stuff left to the imagination but nonetheless you can’t escape the ridiculous appeal of the catchy bubblegum pop nuggets buried in there.
This Hamburg group creates fun, short and snappy little garage-/synth-/eggpunk tunes that don’t stray too far from widely established genre formulas but gets everything about that shit so fuckin’ right as if they’ve been at it for ages, cycling through a decent variety of workmanlike genre exercises that you feel pretty sure you’ve heard somewhere before but can’t escape their catchy spells anyway, so i’m gonna say friends of shit like Beer, Media Puzzle, Winky Frown, Prison Affair, Set Top Box, Ghoulies or Goblin Daycare can’t go wrong with this shit either.
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Melbourne’s Metdog have absolutely cemented their status as one of the major players of the contemporary garage-/synth-/eggpunk scene with last year’s pretty fucking gaga full length Questions and Answers Regarding Computers and Screens. For their newest LP though, they dial down the overall weirdness ever-so-slightly, which i’m gonna say is actually for the better as i think another iteration of that ’90s PC- / early web-themed insanity and ultra-cheesy general MIDI-esque sonics certainly wouldn’t hit quite as hard the second time around. Instead we get a somewhat more streamlined and straightforward bunch of alarmingly catchy garage tunes that still let their freak flag fly aplenty, just in case you were worried things might get even remotely too serious here. Anyway, it’s certainly their most substantial release so far, supported by a matching growth in the songwriting department without giving up too much of the group’s overall playfulness and unpredictability.
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Right on the heels of the Billiam & Busted Head Racked collab EP more excellent shit keeps rolling in already of egg-ish australian garage punk’s prime driving force and it’s a neat little gimmick indeed to put a five-minute track on one side of a 7″ and five one-minute tracks on the other. Naturally, this is yet another kickass bunch of six catchy-as-fuck hits including an explosive Ausmuteants cover tune, but the biggest surprise on here is actually how admirably that aforementioned five-minute song format is working out here. Dude should try that more often! Longpunk or shortpunk? The proper answer is yes, please!
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