New shit by Midgee? Awesome, i’ll have two. Wait what, it also has new tunes by Electric Prawns 2? Just shut up and take my money! Melbourne’s Midgee once again prove to be a safe bet for fans of quirky synth-/garage-/eggpunk goodness in the vein of Prison Affair, Nuts, Set-Top Box or Beer. Quite a bit more ambitious and varied then are the four tunes by Moffat Beach garage sensation Electric Prawns 2, although on this one they mostly act on the sunnier side of their musical spectrum in a set of compact and catchy-as-hell smashers that exhibit many of the virtues of recent Billiam or Alien Nosejob.
Following up on their stellar previous EP, this (probably) Austin, Texas group delivers a way more crude and unpolished – yet no less exciting – batch of new tunes located in the more eccentric spheres of the garage-/synth-/eggpunk spectrum. Less catchy overall but more high-energy instead, this makes for a more than serviceable successor to a plainly sensational record that’s been a decidedly tough act to follow anyway and even as the lesser of the two, it’s still a freakin’ increadible bit of eccentric noise to be perfectly honest.
Always great fun, a new EP courtesy of Ukraine’s best address for quirky and catchy eggpunk goodness that evokes the aesthetic pillars of Prison Affair, Beer, Set-Top Box, Autobahns, Goblin Daycare, Midgee… yeah, this particular sub-branch of the genre is shaping up to become a remarkably international affair and it’s such a joy to watch it all play out over time.
Now if you thought the 2022 EP of this Montreal group was kinda weird and bananas, Pressure Pin be like: “Hold my beer” ‘cos you’ve seen nothing yet! For their second EP, they considerably raise the bar both in terms of sophistication and of unpredictable chaos and mayhem in their totally nuts compositions whose rough characteristics hover somewhere around the spheres of garage-, synth-, art- and eggpunk with a pronounced element of devocore, all the while being hellbent on nuking the confines of those genres respectively. This kind of eclectic anything-goes approach reminds me most of recent works by Trashdog and Checkpoint, though if you take it one stylistic ingredient at a time, you might also find bits and pieces of the ’90s-midi-style pop excursions of Metdog, the Devo-isms of recent Isotope Soap, the sparkling joy of Snooper and the quirky, catchy garage-/art punk explosions of Smirk and Cherry Cheeks. These dudes put more ideas and inspiration in a single tune than your average garage act does in a whole album.
Another Achterlicht EP, another high-octane blast from these dutchmen who have no doubt delivered their best set of tunes so far on this new cassette. The group has never sounded this tight on record before and the songs themselves also show a huge leap forward, delivering a non-stop barrage of dangeruous hooks and catchy tunes roughly in the vein of such garage-/synth-/eggpunk heavyweights as Dadar, Satanic Togas, Research Reactor Corp. and Gee Tee.
Since last year’s already perfectly enjoyable self-titled EP, this L.A. group or project has definitely consolidated and streamlined their operation into a decidedly more impactful, concentrated attack of electrified punk inbetween the parameters of garage-, hardcore- and eggpunk that feels to me like a weird frankenstein bastard fusing together the relentless forces of, say, Arse and 2 Stroke, the noisy fuzz-/garage punk of S.B.F. and whatever weirdness that Zhoop/Djinn/Brundle/RONi etc. guy is up to right now.
There are those kinds of bands lacking a rigid quality control and those that don’t, wisely leaving the lesser takes on the cutting room floor. And then there’s that rare third kind that’s seemingly not in need of any amount of quality control ‘cos pretty much anything they create seems to turn into instant gold. This new collection of unreleased shit that accumulated in the trash bin of formerly Orlando-, now apparently Portland-based garage-/synth-/eggpunk institution Cherry Cheeks makes a thorougly convincing case for them belonging into that latter category as even the scraps, odds and ends they came up with so far are the kind of material other groups should be jealous for really, making for an admittedly weirder, more cluttered and fragmented but by no means less thrilling and energizing listening experience!
This group from Newcastle, Australia delivers five first-rate new blows of electrically driven, vaguely egg-ish and noisy high-energy garage punk shit on their first EP, sure to evoke a nervous twitch or two in those already familiar with such phenomena like S.B.F., Kerozine, Factory City Children, Witch Piss, Cthtr, Feeding Tube, The Gobs or Liquid Face… ‘cos this shit is every bit as good.
Their shit just keeps getting better all the time! Following a very recent EP that showed some considerable growth especially in terms of songwriting, this new one of spain’s chief purveyors of catchy egg-ish noise pop and garage punk pulls that same trick off flawlessly once again, with the first three tracks delivering their trademark melodic dopamine flashes in the most forceful manner we’ve heard of them yet. The melancholy middle track Vuelan Buitres then initiates a slight change of pace with the remainder of these songs going in a somewhat lighter and more playful, yet no less enchanting, direction.
The newest EP by Stockholm’s Kerosene Kream presents their vision at its most realized yet, largely leaving the scrappy eggpunk vibes of their previous EPs behind and moving towards a more psych-leaning variant of garage punk that constantly oscillates between a more innocent, love-and-peace-y UK-style psychedelia and a way darker, more US-centric, drugged-out acid rock sound, overall a mixture of flourishes you might suspect from groups like Pow!, Mononegatives or, very recently, Electric Prawns 2. At times the songwriting might strike you as somewhat basic as tunes like Mindkiller and Psychedelic Ranger are about as close as you can get to what you might call a “traditional” in this genre but hey, you can’t argue with the results. The shit just works.
