What Evil Eye from Charlotte, North Carolina pull off on their debut cassette is easy to describe on the surface as a straightforward strain of Garage Punk combining ’77-ish energy and catchyness with a KBD-like rawness and tons of Dead Boys- and Wipers-level Hooks, though as old as it all sounds on paper, as fresh and alive it all feels in practice and it’s all thanks to some top-notch oldschool songcraft at its core and an adequately rough and propulsive performance to make the tunes stick.
Rough-ass KBD-infused oldschool garage punk shit that sounds to me as if the early works of Strange Attractor got fused with the primitive-as-fuck aesthetics and raw energy of early The Dogs or American Muscle, albeit with an altogether more solid and reliable bunch of tunes to draw from than what the aforementioned two acts had to work with in their earliest days. This shit kicks some serious ass, plain and simple.
Insanely appealing shit, this demo by Sydney group The Moids. What starts out with your kinda standard lo-fi electric beats propelling forward a subliminally egg-ish garage punk sound á la S.B.F., 3D & the Holograms or Witch Piss, gains way more of a rough oldschool KBD quality from the second track Maitland Man going forward, reminiscent more of such groups as Launcher, Liquid Assets, Freakees and Mystic Inane, while Long Week has a stripped-down art rock feel not unlike the earliest Peace de Résistance releases.
This new tape by London group Botox does absolutely nothing new but what it does, it gets absolutely right, distilling a strong and primitive concoction out of ’77-, KBD- and garage punk that’s like 35% fuzz and 45% attitude with the remaining 20% consisting of a thin remnant layer of tried-and-tested oldschool punk tropes and formulas that do their job just fine here in what must be one of the most frugally effective blasts of minimalist punk i’ve heard in a while.
Another utterly puzzling burst of lo-fi hardcore noise is coming to us from an Orlando, Florida group who already had a decent Demo out via Bellicose Records, but this new one on Drunken Butterfly Records is even more up my alley with its completely blown-out and unpredictable make of hardcore punk insanity that, below the rough and grimy surface, has a good deal of an oldschool garage-, proto- and KBD punk undercurrent going on.
A lovely and fun debut by some Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania group. The instrumental opening tune Liftoff Jam (White Boys in E) swells into a monotonous monster of psychedelic haze that sounds a bit as if MX-80 and Chrome were being fused with early The Men, only for the rest of the EP to settle into a slightly less cumbersome aesthetic of straightforward, somewhat Stooges-esque garage punk that occasionally approaches some hardcore speeds and energy levels and keeps setting itself apart by way of its subtle psychedelic overtones and a constant melodic undercurrent flowing through their catchy, oldschool garage- and proto punk stylings.
More quite old-timey, fuzzy (garage-) punk goodness by a group from Oslo, Norway that sorta plays out like an incarnation of early Sick Thoughts or Bart and the Brats suffering from a total amnesia regarding anything that’s been happening after, like, ’82. And this shit works, simply because the underlying tunes never drop the ball even once and the excellent quasi-cover of Devo’s Mongoloid just feels perfectly logical and natural to be included here.
The past weeks have seen a couple of outstanding new offbeat, not-exactly-your-standard-hardcore releases. Just a mere week after their last one, we’ve already gotten a new Piss Wizard EP which once again delivers fuzz-laden hardcore mayhem fused with pronounced KBD, garage- and surf punk vibes, raw and catchy in equal measure with plenty of unlikely flashes of melody hidden under its abrasive surface. The new EP of Winnipeg group Lackey then scratches a similar itch of garage-soaked hardcore in a way more straightforward but by no means unsophisticated manner, their highly flammable riffs plowing ahead in a fashion not entirely dissimilar to recent acts á la G.U.N., Crisis Man, Jug, Chain Whip or Termite. Last but not least, take the traits of the other two groups featured in this post and drench it in more of a ’77 vibe plus a hint of oldschool west coast hardcore and the new EP of Philadelphia’s Body World should be what you get, roughly, but that alone would be disregarding just how inventive and adaptable this group acts here with none of these songs sounding quite alike.
The fourth EP of Melbourne’s Piss Wizard combines their least crappy production values so far with their strongest set of tunes to date in their trademark rough-as-fuck mixture of garage-flavored fuzz- and hardcore punk imbued with plenty of surf twang, rockabilly leads and noise-infested texture. That shit feels sickly, smelly, perverted and contagious in the best possible way!
An awesome debut cassette by this group out of Athens, Geoargia, delivering a salvo of fuzzed out tunes on the intersection of hardcore- and KBD-soaked garage punk. While at times resembling the noise-laden output of groups á la Lumpy and the Dumpers, Soupcans and Black Button i think this stuff would fit equally well within the catalogs of LoFi specialist cassette labels Impotent Fetus and Deluxe Bias, having a similar shambolic energy in common with acts like Septic Yanks, C-Krit, early Electric Chair, Exxxon and Motor Corp.
