It's been a whopping five years since we last heard of this Los Angeles group. Their first LP (duh!) is a bit heavier on the hardcore- and garage punk side of things after their older shit had been leaning stronger into its synth-/electro punk tendencies. Those relentlessly brutal electric beats are still front and center here though, giving especially the epic opening shot Open World kind of an industrial-tinged, cursed Ausmuteants-meet-Big Black vibe… with additional overtones of Crisis Man maybe?
Crawling out of the same brown puddle that previously spat out the wonders of Scab Breath we get two more raw and delightful clumps of garage punk, this time with more of an hardcore edge to it and a slight note of KBD muck. An attack on the senses just as straightforward as it's crude and shambolic - traits you might also find in recent acts á la Modern Needs, Liquids or Fried E/m.
Members of Bib and Nihilistic fit, among a whole shitload of other groups, deliver their first EP here and it's hard to not get excited in face of this explosive force. These are super-solid, mature and elaborate song assemblies made up of a timeless postcore sound which is also perfectly able to slow things down - like in the doom/sludge-leaning excercise Face Down - without boring you to death. Always always a sign of compositional excellence if you ask me. In recent years, we might've heard similar blasts from bands like Romance, Shove, Ascot Stabber, Flowers of Evil or early Bad Breeding.
Members of Diode and Freakees gift us yet another attack of deliciously off-the-rails noise, this time closely scraping past the rough coordinates of post punk, post- and weirdcore. Some repititive The Fall-esque riff leads into pure hardcore anarchy in All the World. Give Me Mine then has a distinctive early Minutemen-meet-James Chance kind of energy to it. Further you might find some traces of Flipper, Saccharine Trust or The Pop Group in there or alternately, you might identify bits and pieces of more recent shit á la Rolex, Big Bopper or Gay Cum Daddies.
A sonic experience wonderfully out of touch with the zeitgeist, crafted by some Bellingham, Washington group. Prime influence here seems to be a whole battery of early-to-mid eighties, loosely SST and Touch & Go-connected stuff - on the more strummy, folk-infused side of things admittedly, but never afraid of spontaneously morphing into short bursts of hardcore punk either. Most obvious amoung those influences would probably be shit among the lines of Angst and Meat Puppets, early Dinosaur Jr. and, secondarily, U-Men, Mudhoney and 80s Scientists, some very slight hints of Dicks and Wipers. Or alternately, you might think of more recent Acts like early Milk Music, Dharma Dogs, Chronophage and Damak.
The Olympia, Washington group's first longplaying cassette, following two equally awesome tapes on the fabulous Impotent Fetus label, still delivers the goods of unpredictable, freewheeling hard- and postcore with additional ingredients of garage punk and mild insanity, stubbornly refusing to fit into your preconcieved notions of what this thing called punk rock is supposed play out like. A fairly eclectic, genre-bending approach which you might, if you really had to, compare to groups as diverse as Das Drip, Warm Bodies, Vexx, Judy & The Jerks, Mystic Inane, Hotmom, Gen Pop or Sniffany & The Nits at one point or another.
This group from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania pulls off a vaguely familiar but nonetheless spectacular combustion of catchy oldschool hardcore energy with some cowpunk vibes to it, operating somewhere inbetween the rough parameters of Germs, Dicks, the early hardcore incarnations of Angst and Meat Puppets, as well as more recent stuff like Fried E/m and Modern Needs.
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.
The newest EP by Pittsburg band Illiterates, following up an already pretty fucking good 2021 record, is nothing short demented and fun oldschool hardcore perfection, kinda making a point of inventing nothing new here while never droppig the ball for a second either - this is one tight, fun and, well… dumb as fuck blast of a record.
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.