Whenever Billiam does shit, it's Billiam week, all week. There's just no way evading the insane allure of one of current garage punk's brightest luminaries who's often getting tagged with the eggpunk label (including by me) and really, probably can't be evaluated in full isolation from that whole mess but also never quite fit into that template all that neatly and frictionless, more often than not feeling way more grounded in an earlier era of quirky garage- and synth punk that preceded our contemporary eggosphere, frequently more Ausmuteants than Prison Affair and chances are, when the genre bubble finaly deflates giving way to a barren eggpocalyptic hellscape, Billiam's just gonna emerge out of the rubble, shake the dust of his sleeves, light a cigarette Snake Plissken style and hum a new tune about the structural integrity of high-rise buildings into his bizarre nuclear-powered steampunk dictaphone on the way home. Anyway, it's Billiam week again and his new LP is a good one, who woud've thought? Engineered by Checkpoint's Erik Scerba (not the dude's only contribution you'll see posted here this week), this may well be the tightest and punchiest a Billiam recording has ever sounded, though thankfully the added fidelity doesn't try anything untoward to sand off his trademark rough edges and eccentric flourishes in these twelve new tunes that once again show off the guy's unfailing, inventive song-crafting abilities, all the while sounding unmistakably like himself yet also never failing to come up with some neat surprise just around the next corner. As a DIY genre auteur he's kinda the equivalent to that certain kind of well-regarded genre director you know is gonna make a certain kind of movie but you also have a well-founded trust in their skills and creative vision to know they'll still surprise and thrill you in unexpected ways every time.
To be quite honest, the discography so far of this french-german group who've been goin' for over a decade by now has been a bit of an unfocused mess at times with more recent releases often missing the determination and never quite reaching the heights of their 2019 War On Words Vol. 1&2 tapes so i didn't expect a whole lot going into this. I'm all the more pleasantly surprised now 'cos on this new one, Warm Swords sound like they mean fucking business more so than ever before, keeping their eccentric ideas and eclectic influences but shaping them into way more tangible, compact and structurally sound little units that are a lot easier to make sense of. The opening salvos of Mirror and Parasite are solid examples of borderline egg-ish art-, synth- and garage punk already but it's with the hypnotic spaced-out post punk of the third tune Friction when the real meat of the album kicks in and just won't ever drop the ball for the rest of the LP, all the while entering different territory with each following tune like the new wave-ish power pop vibes of Save Your Mother, the oldschool Useless Eaters-isms of C-Side, the laid back folk-ish jangle excess of Shortcut Through The Mountain, some lost-in-space claustrophobia in The Anarchist Threat ... the delights and surprises never cease on this overflowing bag of treats . At this level, i'm truly stoked for the next ten years of Warm Swords.
This Bay Area-dwelling group entered the scene with a bang when their 2021 debut cassette dropped and their second LP Instant Pop Expressionism Now! then only further affirmed them as a driving force in the current art punk landscape, which is not all too surprising really once you notice we're dealing with folks who, mainly in the previous decade, have been dabbling about in groups like The World, Andy Human and the Reptoids, Rays and Violent Change. Their third longplayer out via Siltbreeze Records now feels a lot more rustic and brittle than their predecessor, relying heavier on odd iterludes while going lighter on immediately catchy hooks and moments but it's exactly that kind of frugal stinginess that actually makes this record all the more enchanting and rewarding by adding a certain layer of early The Fall-esque repitition that really starts to kick in during In Any Case, and a signature refusal to serve the listener any easy payoff or comforting resolution to the built-up tensions, dissonant loops and patterns. The dub flourishes and techniques in Where The Dream Dwells then have more of a Swell Maps feel to them and maybe, in more recent years, the early works of Exek. Flash #1 on the other hand seems to give extensive tribute to Wire as it could well fool you into thinking you're listening to an excellent Pink Flag outtake, with a bit of a Television and Fall vibe tacked on for good measure, after which Embankment Terror ventures even further into the more pop-oriented side of that early Wire era. So yeah, once again this sounds like a representative round-trip through much of old british DIY- and art punk at times with groups like Mekons, Desperate Bicycles, Membranes, Television Personalities and the aforementioned Swell Maps and Wire coming to mind but at the same time, these tunes have a lot in common with a newer breed of art punk acts aswell in the vein of Cuticles, Famous Logs In History, Onan Servo, Toe Ring and Germ House just to name a couple of 'em.
Philadelphia band Real Shocks already had a perfectly convincing demo out in 2024 but they really hit it out of the ballpark with their new 7" EP out in Stupid Bag Records. This is a wildly creative bunch of oldschool westcoast-ish hardcore punk rippers played by a present-day eastcoast-ish group, chock-full of catchy inspired hooks and quirky flourishes, that on one hand often feels like a slightly dumbed-down version of more recent hard-/artcore acts of the Rolex, Mystic Inane variety but also contains frequent flashes of the noise rock-ish, abstract and increasingly ethereal postcore-meets-art punk riffing and melancholic vibes of Atlanta cornerstones Wymyns Prysyn, Mother's Milk (fka Uniform) and Glittering Insects, the rougher end of the Nag output. Last but not least, i also appear to hallucinate a subtle undercurrent of cowpunk-ish energy á la Leche and Murderer here. Anyway, this is about as right up my alley as an oldschool-ish hardcore record is ever gonna get. The digital release has two bonus tunes that slap just as hard as the rest and are quite obvlously omitted on the 7" merely for length restrictions.
After the first three Installments of the Amateur Hour series on Fuzzy Warbles Cassettes have all been veering more toward the experimental and indulgent side of things, the fourth volume done by Piss Ants really breaks the mold with a number of simple, straightforward garage punk smashers, jangly fuzz punk dittys and pulsing synth punk tunes and boy this is so fucking up my alley feeling like a mix between the likes of D. Sablu, S.B.F., Kid Chrome and Jean Mignon.
JJ Sizza is a dude you may have heard making noise before as a member of australian garage-/post punk acts like Kitchen People and Dr. Sure's Unusual Practice. On his second solo EP he now leans a bit more heavily into catchy-ass power pop territory than we've heard from these groups before and the shit fucking slaps, the opener 50 Cent Coin sounding like it could've either been a lost would-be '80s new wave hit or a forgotten early Flying Nun Records artifact, or also a modern-day garage single by the likes of Andy Human or Nick Normal. That one song contains multitudes already. Hold Music then sounds a bit closer to something out of the Dr. Sure's Œuvre and so does Panopticon Blues, before Skin On Skin combines some classic Ramones qualities with a modern fuzz punk / noise pop-sensibility not unlike Texas groups Sex Mex or, most recently, Eason. The closing tune Don't Wanna See is the weakest point of the record though, it's egg-ish art punk ingredients just not fusing together as well as they should but there's no arguing with the brilliance of anything else on this neat little tape.
Absolutely no need for an introduction to this band i guess? There's no mistaking this for anything other than another Sick Thoughts record, even if the first two tunes are having a bit of an autopilot feel to them, not really going much beyond established '77-inspired garage templates. But who cares really 'cos Drew Owen on autopilot is still a fucking blast in its own right, though quite honestly it's really the two more hardcore-paced tunes Drinking Drugging Watching TV and Feed You To The Dog, the true centerpieces here, where this EP really comes into its own.
Spaced-Out synth punk heroes Cosme of Ciudad López Mateos, Mexico have already slapped hard with everything they did on their three demos so far and now, on their first tape not explicitly labeled as a demo, they simply give us more of the same and what more could i ever ask for if that same is such a freakin' glorious and surreal lo-fi mess of classic power pop hooks colliding with the most melodic branches of mid- to late '80s punk and some new wave catchyness on top. Whatever these dudes touch remains such an insanely satisfying endeavour and so far they ain't showing the slightest hint of slowing down.
Already having an awesome cassingle and an equally excellent EP under their belt, their newest EP shakes things up a good bit for the San Francisco group with the opening tune Billy 3 having an unexpected melodic foundation, A Million Knots allowing some '80s Sonic Youth vibes in its verses. Their cover of The Nerves' Hanging On The Telephone is doing a flawless job too. Previously more interested in complex interlocking art punk arrangements that reminded me of groups like Patti, Reality Group, earlier Fugitive Bubble, the two original tunes on this one are hinting at a more streamlined and focused way forward for the group and i'm all here for it.
Much of this Chicago group's output so far felt just a bit too vague and impalable for me to make sense of it but their new longplaying debut now is playing in a different league altogether. I'm tempted to spew a platitude about how their sound is "clicking into sharp focus" here but really, it's more of an intentional soft-focus putting their jangly melange of power pop, art-, garage- and psych rock, splashes of '90s indie rock and '80s Flying Nun Records-esque psychedelia in just the right light. This shit sounds like something that should've been released about 15 years ago and looking back, it makes me wonder how it happened that particular, timeless subniche kinda went largely dormant since then. Or rather, it kinda was there in the margins all along, just waiting for an impressive, quality release like this to occur and, hopefully, shock the genre out of its self-indulgent mediocrity. There's a surreal, hypnagogic vibe pervading these tunes i probably haven't heard so strikingly since the early works of Rat Columns and Blank Realm at the beginning of the 2010s, though other, more garage-leaning stuff from that same era also comes to mind like the equally jangly and foggy early days of White Fence or Apache Dropout and i can't help but find a distinct note of '90s shoegazers Flying Saucer Attack in there as well. This is just the kind of wondrous, off-kilter weirdo pop album i didn't quite realize i've been missing so much since then.
