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.
Spanish eggpunks Huevo have been on my radar for a bit already but it's only with this new compilation LP featuring all of their previous work in a re-sequenced order and often wildly superior, tighter mixes, that i finally come to fully appreciate the strengths of this group, putting their very own spin on well-established eggpunk tropes that has quite a bit more of an energetic and raw edge than your average release in that sphere, with tracks like Todo Asqueroso having a propulsive force to them that you'd rather expect from not at all egg-ish punk acts like Piss Test, Dollhouse and Easers.
Here's a sensational debut EP by some band or project based in Lethbridge, Alberta containing six perfect blows of post punk whose ear-piercing walls of noise and pulsing electric beats at times sound a bit as if an eggpunk Big Black collided with the somewhat psychedelic qualities of garage greats like late Useless Eaters, Pow! and Mononegatives - or maybe the murky old experimental punk classics of Métal Urbain / Dr. Mix and the Remix - in a breathless succession of certified bangers. I also have a hunch that fans of spaced-out noisemakers á la Corpus Earthling or french magician Pablo X are gonna lap this shit up.
Now that's some hot shit, this debut tape by some dude from Lansing, Michigan. The fuzzed-out garage punk inferno of Cracked lays out a bit of a false trail for us at first, as the overall vibe then immediately shifts toward more of a noisy synth punk direction for the remaining tracks covering a good variety of stylistic flavors and accordingly, reminding me of a full ecclectic grab bag of acts in the wider synth-/electro-/sample punk spectrum including the likes of Beef, ISS, Heavy Metal, Klint, The Garden, Victor, Spyroids, R. Clown, Paulo Vicious and Kerozine.
