Much of this Chicago group's output so far felt just a bit too vague and impalable for me to make sense of it but their new longplaying debut now is playing in a different league altogether. I'm tempted to spew a platitude about how their sound is "clicking into sharp focus" here but really, it's more of an intentional soft-focus putting their jangly melange of power pop, art-, garage- and psych rock, splashes of '90s indie rock and '80s Flying Nun Records-esque psychedelia in just the right light. This shit sounds like something that should've been released about 15 years ago and looking back, it makes me wonder how it happened that particular, timeless subniche kinda went largely dormant since then. Or rather, it kinda was there in the margins all along, just waiting for an impressive, quality release like this to occur and, hopefully, shock the genre out of its self-indulgent mediocrity. There's a surreal, hypnagogic vibe pervading these tunes i probably haven't heard so strikingly since the early works of Rat Columns and Blank Realm at the beginning of the 2010s, though other, more garage-leaning stuff from that same era also comes to mind like the equally jangly and foggy early days of White Fence or Apache Dropout and i can't help but find a distinct note of '90s shoegazers Flying Saucer Attack in there as well. This is just the kind of wondrous, off-kilter weirdo pop album i didn't quite realize i've been missing so much since then.
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.
Just like that Celebrators LP i've just posted, the debut LP of Oamaru, New Zeeland group Cuticles is yet another really freakin' good 21-song LP that could have become a freakin' brillian 15-song LP just by cutting some fat but ya know... i'm not gonna complain about such an abundance of good, especially if that shit is so fucking up my alley. Featuring members of 2010s NZ DIY punk staples Moonrakers and Trendees, this group, which first really caught my attention with their excellent 2023 EP Pavlova, certainly shares some of that shambolic avantgarde DNA but channels it into a much more catchy and melodic whole, trading in much of that raw Half Japanese-style mayhem for a more approachable aesthetic, reminiscent among others of old british DIY acts in the neighborhood of Swell Maps, Television Personalities, Mekons and Desperate Bicycles. There's a good deal of old Flying Nun energy goin' on aswell plus some stray occurences of the more pop-focused end of the Pink Flag-era Wire spectrum in tunes like Making Up Shit. If i had to come up with more recent bands as comparisons, i'd say New York's Famous Logs in History, Philadelphia group Society and the early works of Adelaide's own Wireheads don't strike my as totally off either.
Reuben Sawyer has been active for quite a while already with various groups and projects in a wide variety of musical styles, though he only really entered the 12XU universe in 2023 with Demons Obey, his third LP under the Anytime Cowboy moniker, which has been a strange beast for sure in juxtaposing elements of blues-ish and jangly cowpunk- and garage pop with a somewhat surreal, otherworldly quality anchored by Sawyer's uncannily calm vocal delivery. His newest LP now may as well be his strongest, most accomplished one yet, streamlining his previously somewhat cluttered disjointed sonic space into an unexpectedly cohesive whole, making his equally odd, catchy and melancholic compositions - enabled by some next-level songwriting chops - glow and sparkle like never before.
So here we have the debut EP of a new group from Berlin featuring members of Les Lullies and Slander Tonge among others, confidently acing their way through four flawless tunes of jangly power pop elegance. This is a genre that lives and dies by the quality of the songwriting and these folks pull out all the stop to make it work... the tunes, the arrangements, the performances. Simple as that.
Their newest EP is hands-down the strongest effort so far of this Indianapolis group, who seemingly have left behind the more straightforward rockin' sounds of previous releases and dialed down the energy level considerably for a comparatively relaxed style of garage rock taking many cues from Paisley Underground-ish jangle pop and british psychedelia. And what can i say, they have carefully crafted the tunes to prove they mean business and aren't fucking around here. It's a consistently classy treat of laid-back psychedelic pop that's catchy as fuck without ever running the risk of becoming too saccharine, a bit like a mixture of, say, Good Flying Birds and White Fence, or maybe also an even calmer version of recent power pop goodness á la Shrapnel and Dumbells.
The newest release on the consistently brilliant Total Punk sublabel Mind Meld is yet another stunning achievement from the outer fringes of the garage punk-related universe created by a Sydney group featuring members of Shrapnel, Gee Tee and Satanic Togas among their ranks, although of these, Shrapnel are the obvious comparison for these elegant and accomplished compositions of timeless, jangly-ass power pop and art rock with vague and fleeting echoes of The Soft Boys, The Bevis Frond and Television among many others, in addition to a diverse cluster more recent shit by the likes of Treehouse, Honey Radar, Good Flying Birds, Kitchen's Floor, Chronophage or Violent Change.
This Budapest, Hungary goup really took me by surprise with their unkempt 2022 diamond-in-the-rough debut EP. Here we get to hear the successor which manages to ever-so-subtly refine their sound without losing any of their charming, quirky edge in their strummy approach to melodic DIY punk and indie rock - a mixture that balances out a knack for catchy hooks with a sense of deliberately unresolved drama in their compositions, the latter of which reminds me most of groups like Treehouse, Kitchen's Floor and City Yelps with somewhat weaker similarities to the likes of early Tape/Off, Monda, Pardoner and The Molds.
This Sydney group has an embarrassment of riches in store for us that's being poured into a sonic guise of timeless elegance here - heavy duty power pop songwriting chops take on the shapes of Byrds-inspired, relaxed garage rock, british invasion- and first wave british psychedelia-fueled jangle pop anthems which often come across like a less sarcastic variant of The Soft Boys, a more retro-minded Guided By Voices or the more powerpop-ish corners of the Bevis Frond galaxy, though you may just as well compare them to more recent, mostly US-based groups like The Resonars, White Fence, Honey Radar, Good Flying Birds, Chronophage, Violent Change, Scupper, Germ House or Mo Troper, while in more indie rock-leaning tunes like Winston you can sense just a little hint of fellow australians Treehouse.
