This dude from Schleswig, Germany already made an excellent first impression a couple weeks ago with his debut 7" on Goodbye Boozy. The artwork sure suggests some dungeon synth/-punk affinity, although sound-wise - lacking the latter genre's obvious black- and/or oldschool "heavy" metal elements - i'd rather compare this shit to recent developments on the intersection of garage-, synth- and electro punk and associated acts of the Mononegatives, Pow!, Liquid Face, Ghoulies or Slimex variety.
Somehow i must've overlooked this Ocean City, NJ dude so far. His long playing debut and third release altoghether hits my nerve dead-on though, with a variety of simple & stupid garage-/electro- and, occasionally, synth punk, often with a distinct 77-ish bent calling to mind old pioneers à la Screamers, MX-80, Metal Urbain/Dr. Mix & The Remix as well as a slight hint of Chrome. In Country Girls, quite fittingly, we even get a touch of Gun Club-esque americana-/cowpunk while of the more recent scene, you might draw comparisons to groups like S.B.F., Kid Chrome, Zoids or Mateo Manic.
Garage-/synth-/electro punk from Cleveland, Ohio that carves out its own little place in the current landscape of similar groups by way of a certain psychedelic haze, kinda like a mix between The Spits, Silicon Heartbeat and Smirk, observed through some dense Chrome- or Metal Urbain-esque fog. Or you might describe it as some kind of garage punk incarnation of Murderer's hallucinogenic cowpunk nightmarescapes.
Barcelona group Algara initially burst onto the scene last year with a four track demo as an electro punk duo, which then quickly grew into a four-piece group and promptly released another tape consisting of a re-recording of the first EP's songs as well as some tracks meant for their first longplayer, which we finally get to witness in its full glory now. In the meantime their sound has evolved into a compact and effortlessly flowing fusion of post-, garage- and electro punk that might be described as a mix of ISS, Straw Man Army, Rank/Xerox and UZS, only broken up right in the middle by the strong synthwave flourishes of Hedonistas.
It only took them like… twelve years but finally the Munich duo has released their second 7" via Slovenly Recordings and it's an irresistable blast of garage- and electro punk with echoes of The Spits and Stalins Of Sound, plus an unlikely touch of Big Black in the highly combustible opening track Shut Your Face.
I don't think i ever gave Berlin's mystery act Heavy Metal the full spotlight on here and in retrospect i can't really tell if that was because Heavy Metal weren't quite ready for me or 'cos i wasn't quite ready for Heavy Metal. All i can say is i've been monitoring their curious and prolific trajectory over the past few years and with every release their garage-/electro-/totalfuckingnuts-punk bastard concoctions resonated a bit better with my broken brain until finally they hit a prefect sweet spot with their fifth (duh…) longplayer on which they come off kinda like a more out-there version of a certain North Carolina group that's been rumored to not be punk enough for heavy metal or something… thrown in a blender with a healthy dose of Swell Maps or Métal Urbain/Dr. Mix & The Remix. Never before have they sounded this nebulous and just wrong in all the right ways, except maybe for the idea of fighting the devil… that simply doesn't strike me as the most heavy metal thing to do. It might please the christian rock crowd, though.
Oh my… it took a good two years (or rather, two somewhat below-the-usual-standard years) for this Los Angeles duo to come up with a follow-up to their fiendishly fun debut EP. Just as back then, this is nothing short of another glorious spectacle of sleazy, stinky, forbidden synth-/electro punk delight, the likes of which you'll only ever encounter in the shadiest corners of Bandcamp's adult entertainment section.
Another fine EP by North Carolina electro-/sample-/mashup punk duo ISS on which they, among other things, venture into full-on hardcore territoty (in Facemask), which i don't think they've ever done before and it works just beautifully here.
Another tasty EP by this River Falls, Wisconsin electro punk/-noise duo, on which they once again sound a bit like Big Black going full electro, then joining forces with Primitive Calculators, armed with power tools instead of guitars.
What a beautifully deranged kind of mess, the second Album by Trashdog a.k.a. Andrew Jackson, the dude also responsible for Austin, Texas label Digital Hotdogs. I didn't expect a lot of normalcy here to begin with, but nonetheless i'm kind of astonished by the massive amount of top notch goodness scattered wildly across this record, especially after i found Trashdog's first effort to be of somewhat inconsistent quality. Roughly one third here consists of dumb jokes and various shades of fucking around. Another third turns out to be brilliantly weird and inventive songcraft in a spectrum of garage punk, power pop, synth-/electro punk and a tiny hint of glam. And as for the remaining third, i'm somewhat undecided in which of the first two categories i should file that stuff. The whole of it makes for an awesome, if at times overwhelming, disorienting roller coaster ride. Some kind of white album on stupid pills.
