On their 5th longplayer, a good ten years into their tenure, the San Francisco group comes across as the most focused they've sounded in a long while with much of the fat trimmed off their tunes in their unmistakable amalgamation of catchy-ass eighties college- and nineties indie rock with added elements of jangle pop and shoegaze-y moments that remind me of Swervedriver more than any of the usual genre suspects; pitchfork-era millenial whimsy being coupled with an unexpected sense of earnesty that feels more at home in the golden late-'80s/early-'90s indie rock era. What sounds more like yet another oldschool indie flashback on paper, this group has absolutely made this shit their own over the years. I won't ever forgive them for the title track though, the only true miss on this record as we're well beyond the age where i could tolerate any amount of obvious on-the-nose auto tune, no matter how tongue-in-cheek you go about it 'cos that kind of joke had already gone stale like twenty years ago. Don't do that anymore please. Just don't, 'cos i just can't.
Little Chair of Durham, North Carolina have already put out at least two previous EPs and a split with Tractor Beam and i'll say yeah, these are already perfectly pleasant artifacts of timeless mid-'80s to ealy '90s jangle- and indie pop but things really come together on their newest mini-LP with a tighter, more powerful set of underlying tunes, the arrangements and performance being equally purged of excess slack here for a record that kinda bridges the gap between like the early Sarah Records era, noisy & melodic late '80s college rock side-effects á la Vomit Launch and also some bits of '90s indie rock á la Seam, Unrest, Archers Of Loaf. Anyway, this is some ridiculously appealing shit right here.
Last year's Greg LP by this Minneapolis group was already a real treat bridging the gap between melodic '80s punk (i felt a lot of Moving Targets energy with that one), '90s bordering-on-emo indie rock and 2000s crowdpleasing bearded woodcutter dude punk rock, a record that fell by the wayside of this blog simply for time and capacity reasons 'cos ya know, in a one-man-operation like this place, you sometimes just have to drop some shit you'd totally have given its due if you had unlimited time, focus and energy. Anyway, that won't happen again for their new 7" that even improves on that record's virtues with a more determined attack and their sound incorporating increasing elements of '80s/'90s postcore, especially the a-side Liar now sounding like Jawbox and Jawbreaker doing unspeakable things to each others jaws and Stench Of Calm then reverting to some sophisticated '90s melodic punk/indie shredding in the most satisfying way imaginable.
Already having an awesome cassingle and an equally excellent EP under their belt, their newest EP shakes things up a good bit for the San Francisco group with the opening tune Billy 3 having an unexpected melodic foundation, A Million Knots allowing some '80s Sonic Youth vibes in its verses. Their cover of The Nerves' Hanging On The Telephone is doing a flawless job too. Previously more interested in complex interlocking art punk arrangements that reminded me of groups like Patti, Reality Group, earlier Fugitive Bubble, the two original tunes on this one are hinting at a more streamlined and focused way forward for the group and i'm all here for it.
Whippets are a Madison, Wisconsin group featuring Bobby Hussy and Typer Spatz known from both Wristwatch and The Hussy among other things. Now while i'm all over that last Wristwatch LP i've always had a harder time warming up to much of the previous Whippets output with especially their 2024 debut LP just treading too heavily on a too well-trodden post grunge path for my taste. This new one i get a lot more out of, even though there are still some isolated instances of undercooked song construction like in Dream Of Two, where the dudes just rely too heavy on a nothingness of two not particularly thrilling, pretty basic musical phrases. There are way more hits than misses on this record though, which kinda strikes me as sort of a Wristwatch offshoot steering that band's garage punk leanings closer towards a more ambitious mid-90s to early 2000s indie- and alt rock aesthetic that just happens to test my '90s kid patience when it sometimes just feels a bit too heavy-handed in its mid-tempo earnestness or the song substance just ain't quite up to snuff to make that shit stick. This is by no means a flawless record but whenever it actually achieves liftoff, it soars to impressive heights.
Any new 1-800-MIKEY record is always a treat of pleasantly predictable, uneventful comfort food from a dude otherwise known as part of Gee Tee among other things, whose own little niche on the garage-punk / power-pop spectrum has been well-established by now and though his music won't ever blow anyone away through sheer originality or innovation, it sure always does through the pure and innocent power of straightforward, no-frills songwriting brilliance! And so he does again on his third LP now, unleashing yet another batch of infectious and utterly endearing pop earworms that won't leave you terribly surprised but never fail to delight either in what may be their most relaxed and low-key effort so far, this time at points even fully embracing kind of an oldschool dream pop vibe, especially in the record's second half and tunes like K-Style and Falling In Love.
Austin, Texas group Guiding Light already had a pretty exciting, if still kinda messy debut EP out via Stucco / Down South Tapes in 2024, who are now also responsible for the cassette release of their first full length record (viny is availablel via Post Present Medium), on which they up their game in pretty much every aspect of their sound as the the folk-ish strummy melancholia of Shackled By Lust makes immediately clear and even though that tune ain't fully representative of the rest of the album, it keeps on resonating as a thoroughly impressive opening salvo nonetheless. That greatness persists all throughout the record where their folk- and cowpunk-adjacent strummery somewhere inbetween the likes of Angst and Volcano Suns keeps colliding with eighties Post Punk right between the chairs of, say, Burma, Saccharine Trust, Man Sized Action and early Minutemen, though spiked with occasional bits of Flying Nun Post Punk Psychedelia, catchy Jangle Pop guitar leads and -harmonies, though if instead you feel like naming more recent Folk-/Cowpunk/Post Punk hybrids á la Leche, Cardi O., more recent Rolex or Optic Nerve, i'm gonna say you're right on the money too. Can't miss this one if you're into any of that shit.
Different flavors and intensities of cowpunk-related noise seem to be a running thread in the past two weeks and right on cue, there's also a new record by one of recent years' most impressive voices in the field: Reuben Sawyer's solo project Anytime Cowboy, as usual released without much fuss or even the slightest heads-up in terms of promotion and i like that - Anytime Cowboy certainly ain't a group in danger of getting dubbed an industry plant by kids just coming to terms with the fact that such a thing as the music PR business even exists, haha. Anyway, with how massive an instant classic last year's Demons Obey has been, it would surely be kind of a tall order to expect another of those right away and indeed, its successor doesn't even feel too concerned with one-upping that record and instead comes across as just another very, very good record that may feel a couple tracks too long at one point or another but on the plus side, shuffles things around with a slightly altered, lighter overall feel, leaning a bit heavier into a relaxed and upbeat indie rock vibe while still carrying that unmistakable folk-ish strummy, jangly feel and the uncanny, surreal quality to these tunes. At eighteen of those, the record predictably has a bit of a looser and more fragmented character, though if you judge it by the sheer number of certified bangers on there, i'm gonna say it's nothing short of another fucking winner.
They've been around for way longer than i first realized, this Cleveland, Ohio group featuring, among others, Mickey Mocnik of Nervosas fame who's later also been making awesome noise with The Missed and, most recently, Vital Stress. Anyway, last year's Adaptor EP certainly saw the group move on a bit from their earlier sound dominated by echoes of late '80s, early '90s punk and indie rock-ish vibes with a slight touch of Fastbacks toward a more fleshed-out, kinda contemporary-feeling, yet also perfectly timeless brand of fuzzy, garage-y noise pop with some subtle traces of psychedelia and post punk on top. On this new one, they once again channel their energies into an even more catchy and compact bundle of tunes which once again call to mind mostly 2010s groups like Feature, UV-TV, Slowcoaches or Monster Treasure.
Damn, this Chicago group's noise must've already sounded quite archaic at the time their first LP dropped in 2013 but now, more than decade since their last recorded output, their sound has passively made it full circle back into the pleasantly old-fashioned, timeless and classy bracket of anachronistic noise, their sound clearly taking cues from the likes of Lync, early Jawbreaker and Superchunk or, to a lesser extent, Dag Nasty, Rites Of Spring and maybe also some traces of early Unwound and Hoover? Anyway, these tunes are operating on a level quite a few notches above your average '90s punk throwback, chiefly owing to an abundance of rock-solid songcraft all throughout and an unwavering intuition for timeless heavy-duty, load-bearing hooks, while also leaving plenty of wiggle room for some neat diversions and moments not quite fitting the standard early '90s postcore / emo / indie rock templates like that bit of a Wipers- and Dead Moon-esque garage flavor added to tunes like Caustic Dreams. It's this skillful balance of what strikes me as a quite intimate, encyclopedic knowledge and love of that particular patch of 90s punk history coupled with a marked reluctance to comply with its tropes and conventions too slavishly, adding even more of a unique flavor to a record that's not ashamed to feel vagely nostalgic and retro at points without ever coming across like a tired retread, still able to subvert and exceed my expectations in crucial places, a record equally inspired and old-fashioned.
