Just another quick roundup of noises and disturbances out of the extended hardcore orbit. Starting off the batch with Sex Hater of Kansas City, who will surely please admirers of chaotic and downright filthy hardcore shit in a similar vein to groups á la Total Sham, Fried E/m or Launcher.
Speaking of filth, Clinic from Fresno, California dial that certain aspect even further - their latest EP feeling like one single murky puddle of primitive anger and deep despair, not entirely dissimilar in some places to the early Beast Fiend EPs.
pH People, a group of unknown origin, then slow the tempo down considerybly while by no means lacking energy - their tape on Urticaria Records is a potent mixture from the fringes of harcore punk and (proto-) noise rock with clear echoes of mostly older stuff á la Flipper, Spike In Vain, Noxious Fumes or Broken Talent.
And lastly, there's one for the dungeon dwellers among us in the form of Philadelphia's Alien Birth who deliver an oldschool metal-infested beast kinda like a mix between a more primitive Poison Ruïn and Golden Pelicans going all in on their sleaze rock leanings.
This montreal group's debut EP delights with a batch of fairly melodic, simple-and-effective little smashers in the realm of garage pop, fuzz- and post punk reminding me of a particular cluster of groups from a few years ago including acts such as Feature, Negative Scanner, Slowcoaches and UV-TV. Also, in Get Loose, there's a distinct Wire vibe at play here and y'all know i'm a sucker for that kind of shit.
A neat and explosive little package, this EP by some Norwich, UK dude coming across like a healthy middle ground between garage groups roughly adhering to the Sauna Youth, Ex-Cult, Tyvek or Sweet Reaper formula and the fuzz punk sytylings of early 2010s groups á la Wavves or Male Bonding.
Clamm's follow-up to their already strong 2020 debut Beseech Me is a massive leap forward for the melbourne group and a stunningly confident achievement. Their garage punk driven forward with unrelenting force is somewhat reminiscent of last-decade acts like Ex Cult and Sauna Youth or of more recent stuff in the vein of Flat Worms, The Cowboy or their local contemporaries Hideous Sun Demon. Apart from that, their songs often have a slight psychedelic nudge to them not unlike Destruction Unit or Hamer while, in other places, there is some dark post punk undercurrent present reminding me of Constant Mongrel or early Low Life.
As coincidence would have it, here's yet another group of somewhat fuzzy whereabouts although the available evidence generally points toward Pennsylvania this time. On their most recent full-length effort, a warbly blown-out lo-fi acoustic intro gives way to a knockout punch of a post punk blast that sounds a bit as if the hallucinogenic haze of groups á la Piles or Die! Die! Die! entered the pitch black worlds of Nag. Other times we get somewhat more conventional yet nonetheless ass-kicking flashes of oldschool doom- and sludge-leaning AmRep-style noise rock colliding with the spaced out acid punk excess of, say, Destruction Unit, Hamer or Super-X.
From some uncertain place in Bavaria, Germany comes this beauty of an EP meddling in a fittingly nebulous, fuzz-laden genre spectrum between garage- and acid punk, psych- and space rock. A required listen for, among others, connoisseurs of noise in the vein of Destruction Unit, Osees, Super-X, Hamer, Ounce, Faux Ferocious or Draggs.
With members of Vexx, Gen Pop and Sweeping Promises among them, who’d expect anything short of sheer awesomeness from this Seattle group? Sheer awesomeness is exactly what we get, of course. These eight songs are noise pop candy of the highest caliber, taking some cues out of the playbook of vaguely surf-, more or less JMC-influenced acts such as early Primitives, Joanna Gruesome, early Wavves, Male Bonding or, most recently, UV-TV, the underlying songs being strong enough to still work if you strip away the ubiquitous layer of fuzz, as they do in the gorgeous title track, a melancholy dream pop ballad.
A new tape by that mystery outfit (possibly) from Hicksville, NY on which they stay as unpredictable as ever, this time delivering a batch of infectious below-one-minute melodic garage smashers - high speed fuzzy power pop kinda like an alternate-reality garage incarnation of early Guided By Voices.
This dude from Watford, UK does a lot of things wrong here and i totally fucking love it. You know, like… squeezing 8 songs, 12 minutes of fuzzed out garage rock on a 7" and have that thing spin at 33 RPM for extra negative fidelity. Also, who needs sophistication and nuance in their music if we can simply have everything be very, very loud at all times? Why write a song using three chords if we can do it with just one? Yeah, don't expect anything too smart about this EP but the sheer shambolic intensity makes up for it perfectly. At some points this sounds like an MC5 worshipping incarnation of early The Men clashing with Destruction Unit while more recent groups like Hamer and Super-X aren't too far off either.
No wonder this shit feels familiar. The Wind-Ups is a new solo project of none other than Jake Sprecher of Terry Malts and Smokescreens fame. Much rawer and louder than any of his other groups have dared to sound recently (albeit not quite reaching early Terry Malts levels of speed and fuzzyness), this at times sounds like a fusion of Terry Malts' melodicity with slightly post punk-leaning garage groups like Tyvek or Parquet Courts, while in other moments you can sense a breeze of The Spits, Ricky Hell or anything Reatard(s)-related. Yet when he goes all-in on power pop, there are some undeniable british invasion vibes emanating from his arrangements and compositions.
