The first half of this Austin, Texas group’s newest LP succeeds mostly by way of sheer force and momentum in what admittedly ain’t the most subtle or sophisticated thing you’ve ever heard, a kinda classic riff- and shred-heavy brute force approach to garage punk we’ve previously heard from acts like Jean Mignon, Sauna Youth, Hamer, D. Sablu, Clamm or Sweet Reaper. It’s in the second half that this record really comes into its own though. Just right on time when the magic of rocket-fueled riffing starts to run into the realm of diminishing returns, they shake things up a quite bit and pull some of the album’s biggest standouts out of their hats like the the hymnic, catchy melancholia of Slacker’s Prom, the off-the-shelf-psychedelia-colliding-with-cowpunk explosion Beautiful Delilah, while the midtempo ballad What The Freaks Say offers something of a Vaguess vibe and the closing track Sympathy For Sunday shamelessly revels in drugged-out devil-worshipping acid rock excess.
As usual of a high-caliber, this new Split 7″ coming our way from Italy’s Goodbye Boozy Records. Schleswig, Germany’s Viking Synth Punk Maestro Klint goes full hardcore mode on his side, churning out three massive bursts of his trademark abrasive force, spiked with plenty of melodic catchyness all the same. The dude can do no wrong and there still ain’t anything quite like his music out there. The other side is made up of four new tracks by Hamburg’s The Gents who, compared with their previous EP, are playing it decidedly fast and rough here as well, making for a perfectly substantial attack of straightforward garage punk bearing some similarity to the likes of Bart and the Brats or The Uglies.
Way more egg- than cowpunk, what this group from Poznań, Poland sets out to overwhelm our senses with. This shit is certainly among the more out-there offerings at the altar of playful insanity the genre has given us so far and it’s a bottomless well of unpredictable fun that threatens to fall apart or go up in flames any moment but is so ridiculously satisfying while it lasts, reminding me of a colorful and markedly international bunch of acts such as early Skull Cult, Goblin Daycare, Paulo Vicious, Metdog, Beer, Cool Sorcery… and you can’t leave out Barcelona’s genre overlords Prison Affair of course.
At long last, here’s the debut EP by Brisbane’s Fast Johnny and the Slow Burners which revels in an unexpectedly oldschool make of garage punk mostly free of contemporary trappings – no egg, no synths, no bullshit and more than a little bit of a classic Gun Club energy to it. As such, it’s certainly a bit at odds with more recent developments in the australian underground and could just as well have originated ten, twenty or thirty years ago and wouldn’t have looked out of place. And what can i say, the formula still works flawlessly as the individual tunes simply stand up to the occasion and sometimes it doesn’t take more than a bunch of killer riffs and a steady beat to make me go like mmmh, that’s nice.
This group from Leipzig, Germany presents a curious mixture of slightly garage-leaning post punk that should sound pleasantly familiar to vigilant observers of the german scene yet operates on a level way above your average german-language punk artifact. The EP starts out strong with the death rock-infused vibes of A-B-C Alarm and only gets even better from there with songs like Trikont and Un Día En Grimma echoing other local garage acts á la Lassie, Ambulanz and Exwhite while other moments transport some of the DIY post punk vibe of Onyon or of Berlin groups like Pretty Hurts, Pigeon, Aus, Benzin and not least the also partly Leipzig-based group Laff Box.
On their kickass debut cassette this group from the british island of Jersey enters the scene with a fully formed sound juxtaposing some rather dark lyrical contents with completely opposite sonics of a markedly quirky, egg-ish quality, all of which reminds me of such things as early Powerplant, Tommy Cossack & The Degenerators, Wristwatch, S.B.F., Chtr or Beer.
Exquisite new spaced-out goodness on the fantastic second EP of this singaporean group whose acid-drenched haze of garage-, post- and synth punk feels a bit like a way more pissed-off variant of shit á la Useless Eaters, Ex-Cult, Pow! or Mononegatives, with just a smidge of rowdy primitive energy á la early Strange Attractor thrown in for good measure!
It’s been over six years since we’ve last heard from this Bloomington, Indiana group which by now must be considered a highly influential force on the current garage-, synth- and eggpunk scene while in the meantime, members of the group have pumped their creative juices into acts like Belly Jelly, QQQL, Dummy and Big Hog. Now that they finally break the deafening silence, i gotta say this shit works better than ever in what must be the strongest set of tunes they’ve delivered so far. Just a tiny bit less weird and cluttered than on their previous efforts with more grounded, catchy and melodic song foundations and echoes of the likes of Tyvek, Marked Men and Lost Sounds, this is a strikingly mature work with all the hallmarks of a band that took a long break to branch out creatively in other projects, now reconvening to apply everything they’ve learned along the way with sleepwalking precision to an effortlessly wrecking result.
Insanely engaging garage shit from a Detroit group via the reliable local cassette forgery Painters Tapes, covering an admirable stylistic bandwidth that successfully combines many traits of quirky and elaborate garage punk groups á la Uranium Club, R.M.F.C., Erik Nervous, Satanic Togas, Exwhite and Dumb, the DIY post punk/garage-hybrids of Shark Toys and many flashes of contemporary eggpunk like Prison Affair, Clarko, Snooper, Beer, Winky Frown, Завірюга, Midgee, Gobs and Goblin Daycare. There’s no room for boredom here as you can never know what’s gonna lurk behind the next corner of this freakisch little tape.
This new LP by some Elkhart, Indiana dude sees a strikingly simple and time-honored formula getting fucked up to absolute perfection, taking on a sound inbetween the worlds of garage- and hardcore punk, some KBD-leaning eccentricities and a hint of synth-/electro punk in Vacant, succeeding simply by way of overloading our senses with a thick layer of blown-out noise and fuzz. Having a number of high-octane instances of timeless catchy punk excellence like Not A Toy to rely on sure doesn’t hurt either, making for twenty glorious minutes of slightly Lumpy & The Dumpers-esque fuckery which, of more recent years, has also some kinship to groups like Small Portions, Yacht Fire, Dick Hick, Power Shovel and Delta 8.
