Holy fuck, what this Wakefield, UK group is pulling off on their debut EP is pushing so many of the right buttons for me. Rooted in timeless buzzsaw-guitar post punk with more than just a bit of a Big Black edge, this shit also incorporates much of a catchy garage punk immediacy, noise rock sonic assault and relentless hardcore propulsion with plenty of melodic scraps and fragments peppered all throughout. This is so fucking up my alley and reminds me of another crop of UK post punk acts that either predate or avoid the more gentrified nature of the current UK landscape, the closest comparisons i can come up with from the top of my head would be Leeds-based groups Cool Jerks and Coded Marking, but that doesn't tell the whole story either.
This group's debut EP is Indiana DIY punk at its best that on one hand appears to have quite a few things in common at least spiritually with the state's early eggpunk scene as it certainly has a similar air of chaos, inventiveness and unpredictability you'd expect of a Skull Cult or Erik Nervous record for example, even though the rough sonic parameters here are often of a completely different nature, ranging from propulsive straight-ahead garage punk and a no-bullshit hardcore energy reminiscent of another indiana curiosity - that whole Zhoop/Feed/Djinn/Brundle/etc. clusterfuck - to plenty of geographically rather unrelated postcore vibes of the Wymyns Prysyn or oldschool Hot Snakes-/Drive Like Jehu variety, various stages and incarnations of NYC's Science Man or the fuzz punk excess of early The Gobs. Anyway, as you may have gathered, there's always some thrilling and unexpected shit happening on this record.
Here's an odd one for you, and i mean that in the most positive sense, coming from a group presumably from Charlotte, North Carolina. The thing starts out as very much of a hardcore record, though even throughout the first couple tunes you can't help but notice that pronounced spaced-out psychedelic undercurrent and an increasingly catchy, melodic quality as well as some top-notch ability of song construction underneath that really goes into overdrive in the fourth track Misery, after which the record then incrementally slows down the tempo with each track and leans even more into an acid rock-driven post punk, postcore and art punk vibe that reminds me a bit of recent Science Man, Optic Nerve and there's even a slight bit of LoFi-era Poison Ruin in Make A Case. Inevitably, the record eventually reaches something of a full-on space rock territory yet retains all of these at times subtly emo-fied, melancholic undertones and ist melodic brilliance and you know what, at no point does this group sound much like anything else around really - the best comparison i can come up with for the second half from the top of my head are the likes of recent Shrudd and some of Electric Prawns 2, but really that's kind of a stretch already. You also may compare the larger-than-life drama of the record's middle section to Tom Lyngcoln's Raging Head LP or his more recent band and spiritual successor to that one-off record, Metho. But none of these comparisons truly stick here. This record is freakin' unique is what i'm sayin'.
This group from Kansas City has hammered together a thoroughly impressive debut Cassette here, available via the local powerhouse Dirtbag Distro, made up of eleven punches of deliciously raggedy and pissed oldschool-ish hardcore. I do think the bandcamp blurb mentioning Minor Threat and Black Flag kinda undersells this record though, which actually comprises of a lot more than just your average retro early '80s hardcore rehash, keeping things thrilling and unpredictable all the way thanks to tons of neat little quirks and creative brainfarts, enhanced with a constant garage-y, KBD-ish undercurrent and pulling it all off in a way that to me feels as much in conversation with the weirder end of the more contemporary hardcore spectrum as it certainly is with the ancient classics and as far as those are concerned, there's always a peculiar, eccentric quality to these tunes and an offbeat layer of dissonant noise that often reminds me way more more of oddities of the Gray Matter, Flipper and Really Red variety (though i do get the Germs comparison), rather than the usual suspects of old.
Super neat thing, this newest EP by Götri of Jakarta, Indonesia, on which they craft an explosive cocktail of hardcore punk that's as heavily garage-infused as it's indebted to the classic early eighties era in its no-frills simplicity and unbroken momentum with every tune on here built around a minimal but effective hook and all the fat stripped away and what can i say, the shit just works!
After the grave diasppointment that was the too-slick-for-its-own-good, overly sanitized second Poison Ruïn LP recently, i'm glad to have come across this neat substitute drug created by a Philadelphia group, scratching some similar itch of strongly '80s heavy metal-influenced, dungeon-adjacent punk, even if the overall style here feels more at home in the wider hardcore and d-beat landscape. Nonetheless, if you take a closer listen these tunes reveal an abundance of sophistication, attention to detail and tons of highly captivating hooks to both anchor and elevate these seven bursts of breakneck-speed ecstasy.
The last two weeks had two outstanding hardcore releases in store for us which i'll take the shortcut of rolling into one post here. Brainwash Victims from Milwaukee, Wisconsin have a new cassette out via Alawful Assembly sporting a sound that's not only fuzzed-out and noisy, raw and pissed as fuck but also comes up with plenty of inventive twists and turns, catchy hooks and melodic overtones along the way. These dudes don't just go hard, they've also got the tunes to make it stick!
Cleveland's Yambag then is a group i've had a bit of a sketchy view of over the years, especially with some of their more recent outings which at times sounded as if the harder these dudes play, the less effort they tend to put into the underlying tunes as if to compensate for a lack of song substance... Anyway, a decade into their efforts, they've released a new eight-song EP that shows them from their best side with a strong set of new tunes that keep things simple but also hard-hitting and catchy, just about hitting the sweet spot in their stylistic Venn diagram where everything that makes them shine is in place and perfectly dialed in. This one's a keeper.
New hardcore shit from Athens, Georgia that owes its overwhelming what-the-fuckness and disorienting qualities in part to the completely blown-out fucked-uppery in the engineering department but also in no small part to some hints of noisy Big Black-ishness that still seeps through the cracks underneath a brittle surface of pure distortion and white noise. Strip all that muck away and you may be left with the greatest or the worst hardcore performance in the world and i don't care either way 'cos the way it is, this shit sounds like pure bliss to me.
The second EP of these Oslo metalhead punks is yet another rippin' affair of NWOBHM-inspired hardcore thrashin' that feels a bit too old-fashioned to fit into the dungeon punk category, a bit too thrash-heavy to fit the motörpunk mold. There's also a bit of a '90s postcore quality goin'on in the closing track Shallow Grave. Sitting comfortably in the middle between a good number of adjacent niches, this is a record that scratches many itches at once and i'm all here for it.
Physicalist is a new group from Vancouver i presume, centering around Dave P of the local power pop sensation Night Court whose catchy qualities are also present on this record of otherwise pretty different sonics, an infectious blend of hard-, art- and postcore with a distinct garage punk edge and melodic overtones which overall reminds me of a bunch of groups like Mystic Inane, Rolex, Launcher on the more hard-/artcore side of things and The Dumpies, Sauna Youth and Eyeball on the catchier, pop- and garage leaning side.
