Following up on their already quite awesome 2019 demo, Austin group Dregs shift their sound a good bit away from a more garage- and fuzz punk leaning sound, further towards a harder to pin-down mix of influences on the fringes of 80s-to-mid-90s hard- and postcore, among others suggesting the likes of X (US), Dicks or Flipper at some points, postcore groups like Gray Matter or Drive Like Jehu at others while more recent bands like Vexx, Cel Ray, Gen Pop or Little Ugly Girls wouldn't sound too far off either.
More quirky garage punk insanity from that Barcelona group who already made an excellent impression with previous EP two years ago. Somewhat more focused and confident sounding on this one, this is another delightful blast of high-percentage egg-ness in a similar vein to, say, R.M.F.C., Set-Top Box, Nuts or Spain's own wonders of the Prison Affair, Finale and Beta Maximo variety.
Beautifully shambolic chaos operating somewhere around the weirder fringes of hardcore and garage punk. When in hardcore mode, i'm most reminded of Cells and other hardcore-leaning projects of Connie Voltaire while on the garage side of things, i'm thinking of stuff á la Liquids, early Erik Nervous or - more recently - Print Head and Scab Breath.
New stuff from Gee Tee or Vee or whatever, this dude's shit is all good! On this LP, he's holding a nice balance between the power pop tendencies of his recent Tee Vee Repairman records and the somewhat more garage-leaning projects of his á la Satanic Togas, Research Reactor Corp. and Set-Top Box, making for another fine batch of fuzzed-out garage pop tunes, among them some of his most infectious ones so far, that's for sure.
A duo made up of Kimi Recor and Vinny "Vaguess" Earley, you can't really overlook the similarities to the latter dude's recorded output but there's also more going on here. Starting off from a familiar mix of garage- and post punk there's some clear Lithics kind of energy in some places or Welt Star, another Earley-related project comes to mind while songs like Staring at the Sun and Please 3 sound like forgotten Woolen Men tunes that fell through the cracks somewhere and Chameleon has the vibe of a Digital Leather deep cut from an alternate cold-wave reality.
New depravity by polish garage punk's current prime movers and shakers Moron's Morons! To put it simply, this shit is fucking good - a vaguely traditional oldschool garage goodness mostly reminiscent of other european groups like Shitty Life, Dadar, Mitraille or Gluer as well as a few US acts á la Sick Thoughts, Hank Wood & The Hammerheads. Also plenty of more oldschool stuff to mention here like Australia's overlords Saints and Radio Birdman, classic California punk shit of the Germs, Agent Orange, Adolescents variety goin' on in numbers like Psychosis Diagnosis and Nothin' for You.
Much stronger than i figured at first glance, the debut tape by Chicago group Cel Ray. This shit is carrying similar vibes to some of the great female-fronted punk groups of our time like Vexx, Negative Scanner, Judy & The Jerks, Amyl and the Sniffers, All Hits, The Neuros, BB and the Blips… while also apparently taking cues from a larger cluster of groups on the intersection of post- and garage punk á la Patti, Reality Group, Uranium Club, Ex-Cult or Mystic Inane.
Three hardcore releases especially stuck out this week, all of 'em more or less treading off the genre's beaten paths. The most conventionally sounding - relatively speaking of course - is the EP by People's Temple on NY label RoachLeg Records, giving us an extremely tuneful variation on 80s hardcore, at times coming across like a blend of Circle Jerks with early-to-middle-era Naked Raygun and with occasional flourishes of Hüsker Dü to boot. Of more recend Bands, Fried E/m might also fit the bill. Hickey's tape on Archfiend records then infuses contemporary strands of garage-, synth- and eggpunk weirdness with plenty of oldschool hardcore energy, along the way also evoking the some vibes of Flipper, Spike in Vain, Broken Talent… With this release, we might just be entering the eggcore era! Montreal's Hood Rats operate in a vaguely similar territory, also having a sound grounded in garage punk brimming with lo-fi eggpunk quirkyness just as much as with an unkempt KBD energy and the tunes to make it stick.
On this unbelievably un-british sounding LP - kind of an expanded version of last year's Happy Bank Holiday EP - Sheffield group Big Break set up twelve furious bursts of undiluted garage punk thrust in a way that most often reminds me of both australian and US acts such as Hank Wood and the Hammerheads, Split System, Easers, Jackson Reid Briggs & The Heaters and The Cowboy, to name just a few.
A kickass EP of this Glasgow group originally released roughly a year ago, now hopefully getting saved from relative obscurity by local label Gold Mold Records who've just reissued this beauty digitally and on cassette. On it, we get fresh supply from the realm of dungeon punk-ajacent noise reminiscent of a whole range of groups like, naturally, the current genre overlords Poison Ruïn, the heavily motörized/sleazified garage punk of Cheap Heat, Golden Pelicans and Polute, hard-/postcore-leaning acts like Tarantüla, Bloody Gears and Video.
