Family Dog of Nashville, Tennessee deliver more of their exciting insanity on their second EP in the form of garage- and noise-infused hardcore punk that combines a rabid, unleashed performance with an insatiable creative drive, carrying that certain sense of tension and unpredictability that a present-day hardcore punk records really needs to capture my attention – these five tunes deliver that in abundance and every time you thought you kinda knew how this record was gonna play out, you can be sure they’ll take a sharp turn towards an entirely different place just a couple beats ahead.
This is exactly one minute of new Eye Ball material. Well guess what, this super-wasteful cassette release via Knuckles on Stun is really freakin’ good, as is anything this band has touched so far. Only next time, maybe put like thirty to sixty of these on a tape for it to make any fucking economic and ecological sense.
First-rate new eggpunk goodness comes to us from one-man-band bedroom project Walter Ego out of Aschaffenburg, Germany. While this shit no doubt dabbles in, at this point, quite familiar sounding territory with varying echoes of such genre powerhouses like Prision Affair, Billiam, Beer, Set-Top Box or Nuts, it also never fails to hit the spot dead-on in a perfectly dialed-in mid-fi aesthetic balancing garage crunch with eggpunk whims and quirks and on top of it all, Race The Alps and even more so the closing track Forevermore (In The Dungeon) are nothing short of certified instant genre classics.
Last year’s full length debut of this Raleigh, North Carolina group already made a lasting impression and their latest EP via the local scene bulwark Sorry State Records continues in a similar vein, although there are also gradual changes to be gleaned here, with their overall aesthetic feeling more playful this time and not quite as grim as it still was on the LP, with those quirky toy keyboard vibes and a good deal of nutty ideas making for an excellent counterweight to their otherwise pretty much wrecking ball-like sound inbetween the worlds of Noise Rock, Post- and Synth Punk that once again reminds me a lot of groups á la Isotope Soap, Broken Prayer, Powerplant, Kerozine or Beef.
A hefty charge of synth-enhanced in-your-face hardcore and garage punk driving straight into the abyss in an act of blissful defiance, that’s what we’re geting on the debut tape of Buffalo NY group Havana Syndrome. On one hand this shit has a bit of an unhinged Lumpy And The Dumpers energy and a straightforward attack akin to that Feed/Zhoop/Brundle/Nightman/etc dude but just as much i feel reminded of a number of varyingly egg-leaning groups like Baltomore’s Quitter, Italy’s own The Bad Plug, the greek eggpunk pest that is Μπριτζολιτσεσ and there’s also an undeniable hint of early Skull Cult or Research Reactor Corp at play here.
The newest three minutes of Snarewaves noise may be the first time we witness some cautious tweaking of their winning fuzz punk formula, insofar as the first three tracks not only slow things down just a notch but also see them de-cluttering their sonics just enough to make the underlying toolset almost discernable, like, for the first time i’m like 80% confident that we’re hearing an actual guitar here rather than (as i previously suspected) oldschool bit-crushed samples and the good news is that their tunes are more capable than ever of carrying that shit along even when forced through somewhat less of a sonic meatgrinder, slightly less reliant on the obscuring and flattering qualities of that super-crunchy aesthetic, though it certainly helps nonetheless.
The past couple weeks had quite an abundance of incredible short-form 2-track releases and i’m even shorter on time than i anticipated as, on top of my infamously unreliable brain chemistry, this week also came up with a family emergency for me to help mitigate, so i’m gonna take the liberty of just dumping the four strongest of the batch in a single post.
The most surprising of thiose was certainly the debut (?) single of Atlanta, Georgia group Assembly, covering a pretty wide and eclectic stylistic spectrum in the postcore, noise- and math rock field ranging from classic ’90s and early ’00s Dischord-flavored sounds of the Faraquet, Bluetip and Q And Not U variety over other ’90s phenomena like Polvo, Braniac and Chavez to more recent noise rock and art punk acts like Wax Chattels, Solderer, Body House, Haunted Horses and, most of all, Spray Paint and assiciated later acts Rider/Horse and During.
Australia’s Tee Vee Repairman – yeah, of course it’s another group of Gee Tee’s Ishka Edmeades – follows up a bunch of previous EPs and a brilliant LP with a new 7″ whose two songs can easily be counted as among the finest in a discography that’s never been lacking in infectious power pop melodies to begin with.
In a similar vein, there’s a new Smirk (aka Nick Vicario, also of Public Eye, Crisis Man und Cemento) 7″ that also sees the dude considerably upping his songwriting game, going places we haven’t seen of him before with Domestic Dog kinda fusing oldschool anarcho and post punk flourishes with a pronounced 77-ish melodicity and an almost Television-like spaciousness that also permeates the other tune Manhunt in Paradise, the whole of which sounds a bit like the most recent Institute LP being taken a step further in its art punk elegance.
And finally, in contrast to the previous bands, we have an example of a group plainly serving up more of the same and what a brilliant kind of “same” that is, the new 7″ of Brooklyn power pop group Shop Talk who’ve so far always blown me away with every new release and the new one can do no wrong either, with Museum Of Sex being another flawless instance of catchy and straightforward ’77-ish punk with that distinct Dickies flavor while the more intricately constructed Gaslight slows things down a bit, adds a more melancholy vibe and equal parts of a Buzzcocks- and Replacements quality to the mix. A knockout tune to say the least.
I like to fool myself into thinking that i actually don’t have much a natural inclination towards raving fanboy-isms and try to avoid these kind of things here as good as i can, but this is one of the rare occasions where i’m just plainly unable to contain my euphoria for such a singular group that has sent such insane waves through the garage punk scene and basically set new benchmarks for catchy pop tunes with a deep and unique sense of melancholy, and all that that after the group’s Jeff Burke and Mark Ryan had previously already established themselves as invaluable garage punk luminaries by fronting another essential genre mainstay, The Marked Men. Right from the start, Time Won’t Bring Me Down strikes me as yet another instant classic of the ultra-classic Radioactivity school and Watch Me Bleed radiates that same familiar and unique feel before This One Time slows things down for the first time and sets the tone for much of what’s to come on this record, which more than ever leans into the group’s calmer, moodier side and an almost classic power pop vibe that in parts should feel familiar already to those acquainted with the Jeff Burke-penned tunes on the two Lost Balloons LPs while there’s still enough high energy rockin’ out goin’ on to also please all fans of previous Radioactivity records. Now, for most lesser groups, going slow for much of an album is usually a bad idea and a recipe for boredom and it truly takes some superior capabilities in songwriting and arrangement to pull that shit off successfully. Well, cue Jeff Burke, one of the the most accomplished songwriters of the punk scene alive today, whose unreal craftsmanship never falters even once on what might actually be the greatest Radioactivity record to date. But honestly, in a discography as immaculate as theirs, it’s actually kinda futile trying to pick a favorite.
A ridiculously impressive debut LP from this Tokyo-based group that unleashes a perfect storm of melodic but equally prouplsive noise pop and garage punk with an unpredictable, freewheeling creative energy at its core with no two songs sounding quite alike but everything feels as if made of one piece nonetheless, cycling through nine iterations of catchy noise that kinda alternates between the more straightforward sonic spaces of, say, Dark Thoughts, Sonic Avenues, Bad Sports or early Terry Malts on one hand and the way more incalculable and freakish bursts of melodic ruckus most recently heard from Eye Ball and The Dumpies on the other side of that equation.
Considering the rave reactions i’ve heard so far about this Melbourne group’s shows, their good-not-great 2024 debut EP so far had convinced me that their probably incredible live sound has been struggling a bit to translate into recorded form. Well, i can certainly say that this is less of an issue for much of their new mini LP which makes an overall much stronger impression for their sparkling sound that at times kinda reminds me of the psychedelic and variably surf-infused garage rock of Crsytal Stilts and Disappears mixed with a hint of early No Age and maybe White Fence, in addition to the eccentric monotonous fuzz escapades of City Yelps and the ethereal, abstract post punk melancholia of Kitchen’s Floor and Mother’s Milk… A quirky mixture that is for sure but it works quite admirably. Even when the band runs an acute risk of overstretching their most airy qualities in the record’s slow middle stretch, the bet pays off and shit just refuses to come apart, however precarious it might look at first glance..
