Awesome new shit from Basque Country-based label Mendeku Diskak. First off there's a new EP of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania group Iron Breed on which they serve four delicious treats of catchy garage-flavored Oi! shit with an oldschool strummy power pop-ish quality to boot. The debut EP of Gare Du Nord, a group of somewhat nebulous international origin then feels a bit like the more rough and old-fashioned flipside to that same thing as they churn out no-frills catchy tunes with both a distinct '77 and eighties europunk flavor, kinda as if the current breed of french and belgian garage/oi!/post punk groups went all-in on their original inspiration.
For the last three years or so, Sprgrs of Granada, Spain have been an ever-present mainstay at the upper-mid tier of contemporary eggpunk groups and while they seem seem perfectly content with that status, reproducing the genre's basic ingredients with workmanlike consistency, it should also have become abundantly clear that these dudes came to stay and ain't going anywhere anytime soon. I'm fine with that, as there's still pleny of fun to be had with their music even if the day may never come on which they finally transcend the genre's self-imposed limitations. It's a very burger-and-fries type of record and sometimes you're just craving for ecactly that kind of musical junk food..
These australians' 2023 mini-LP was tons of weird-ass dungeon- and fantasy-themed fun already and their newest longplayer has an even stronger batch of headsplitting tunes made up of elements of garage-, synth- and post punk that right out of the gate delights with a distinct flavor of vintage Useless Eaters and Ausmuteants action in the opening track Pillager, complemented with a note of psych-/acid Punk á la Pow! in Moneyman while Big Hat - one of two holdovers first heard on their 2021 Mammon Machine EP - has a bit of a Strange Attractor vibe and Dopaminer may easily fool you into thinking it's an exceptionally strong Why Bother? tune. Further, i can imagine friends of the likes of slightly more dungeon-flavored like Curta'n Wall or Oslo's own eggpunks Molbo getting a kick outta this shit.
This is a great week to channel your inner basic punk bitch as at least three out of the four records i'm posting today aren't exactly gonna win any awards for innovation and originality but make up for it by sheer competence in songwriting and determined sledgehammer performances. And so does this new Citric Dummies Record (which is exactly as much a split record as Zen and the Arcade of Beating Your Ass was a Hüsker Dü record and Die Nasty had any Rikk Agnew on it), which pretty much perfects the group's formula combining lots of Dead Boys energy with some Rocket From The Tombs and Death-informed proto punk flourishes, some pre-Rollins Black Flag- and Bad Brains-ish early hardcore punk to a highly flammable concoction that, despite inspiring all that retro name dropping, manages to feel weirdly contemporary.
Fuck yeah it's yet another Imploders record free of big surprises but also free of disappointments. As before they seem to lean entirely on oldschool hardcore bits and tropes, none of which wouldn't have existed already by 1983 at the very latest. The shit just works 'cos the Toronto group knows one or two things about robustly constructing a catchy tune and hammering it home in a powerful precision attack.
As with their previous two-and-a-half EPs, Denver, Colorado group Glueman ain't fucking around here, sticking to their basics in the form of no-frills straightforward and noisy garage punk that never fails to hit the nail right on the head with this bunch of new tunes which are gonna have admirers of shit á la Buck Biloxi, Sick Thoughts, The Dirts or Bart and the Brats approvingly bobbing along once again.
The Nashville, Tennessee eggpunk übergroup is back with a second LP that ain't nearly as radical a departure from their previous work as the thumping electric beats of the preview track Worldwide would've had us believe at first. Rather, after the culture shock of their first LP which saw their first live band incarnation ripping through most of the early EPs' material with unrelenting hardcore intensity, this new one is in parts a bit of a return to the playful and varied experimentation of their early days. Like with its predecessor, we've heard some of these tunes before in one form or another, most notably Subdivision, which has first been heard all the way back in 2022 on their Town Topic 7" and the Beatles cover tune Come Together which goes even further back, first appearing on 2021's G.T.R.R.C. III compilation, though both have been given a thorough makover here and so have most of the previously known tunes. What can is say, this album is yet another fun, glorious freakout of quirky, catchy noise on the fringes of garage- and post punk that never seems to run out of steam and ideas.
Okay here's some new shit of this, apparently, newly UK-based dude who's supposed to be from Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico originally, which is a real town actually but a quite small one at that and thus i'm just gonna say that statistically... Yeah to be honest, i don't know if there's any truth (or consequences for that matter) to anything the Bandcamp bio tells me about Jacket Burner. There's little doubt about the qualities of his new LP though, which comes with his strongest batch of tunes to date and once again gets the maximum oomph out of tried-and-tested oldschool garage punk formulas that kinda feels like the basic traits of Buck Biloxi, Spits, early Sick Thoughts and Bart and The Brats being boiled down into strong and exquisite shots of poison with a striking note of '77 and KBD-related simplicity.
More exciting eggpunk of the minimalist and fuzz-heavy variety comes to us from this UK-based group whose tunes don't do much to break the established patterns at first glance, but who fucking cares really when every single one hits the nail on the head so effortless and precise in an all-killer succession of snappy and catchy-as-fuck fuzz pop attacks that call to mind a mixture of, say, Elvis 2, Kid Chrome, Power Pants, S.B.F. and Satanic Togas.
Incredible debut EP by a London group fronted by Chubby (of Chubby and the Gang fame of course), whose vocals are probably the thing most reminiscent of his old band here, as the rustic Oi!-aesthetics - while still subtly present here like a faint background hum - give way to a somewhat more polished and vibrant but in no way less vigorous sound that feels like an ultra-compact encapsulation of various greatness in the melodic punk, power- and noise pop world both past and present, spanning from classic Hüsker Dü-ish vibes, over the instant catchyness of noise poppers Terry Malts and the most recent Dumpies and Eye Ball releases, to the strong melancholic touches of peak-era Leatherface or (Royal Headache-) Shogun's recent groups Antenna and Finnogun's Wake. Potent shit, can't wait for more of that!
