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.
Ever wondered what happened to the dungeon punk genre? In the early '20s it felt like that shit was gonna take the punk scene by storm but today there's no denying that there hasn't been a major genre landmark since last year's Steröid LP... there've been some attempts of course like that Powerplant record which sadly devolved into a tedious mess of half-baked prog fuckery and let's not even speak of the disappointment that was Poison Ruïn's recent too-slick-for-it's-own-good venture into radio rock territory. But anyway, here's a more than worthy genre entry for a change, coming from a group i didn't truly expect to go down that route, even though their more recent artwork subtly hinted in that direction at the very least.
Let's also address another elephant in the room that i just can't stay quiet about and that is the quickly proliferating practice of effectively asking vinyl prices for digital downloads on bandcamp, with a completely ridiculous one-dollar-per-minute rate quickly becoming the norm from certain bands and lables. Cut it out dudes, that's a fucking dick move.
With that out of the way, these swiss dudes have crafted a quite excellent second album that on one hand doesn't add any new elements to the genre toolkit but then again maintains a level of quality and cheesy fun that i was missing from the genre in the previous twelve-plus months. For them, it feals like a natural, organic progression keeping all the catchy qualities of their previous work while seamlessly merging that distinctive layer of ancient heavy metal into their tunes. Not afraid to get a bit corny at times (yet also never too much so), this record delivers a neverending surge of often quite obvious low-hanging-fruit kinds of hooks. I have no complaints here though 'cos that shit just fucking works. S.G.A.T.V. play their shit straight but their steady aim always perfectly hits your primal instincts every single time. The expected age of dungeon punk supremacy is still postponed until further notice but as long as records like this come along every now and then, maybe the genre can at least continue its work by slowly undermining and nibbling away at the dark empire's foundations from the inside.
In the current, heavily consolidated and codified eggpunk era, the third EP of NYC's Raybees doesn't exactly break the genre mold on a surface level, but stil sticks out by at least bending the rules a decent bit, elevating what at first glance could have been yet another average artifact of the Prison Affair school with a more cluttered production aethetic and what sounds to me like some truly fun pots-pans-and-washbasket style bedroom drumming laid atop the otherwise kinda standard vintage electric beats. There's a genuine sense of joy and a creative spark emanating from these songs which the genre is often lacking for me more recently and it certainly helps that there are some heavy-duty songwriting chops on display here too, especially in the increasingly synth-dominated second half with tunes like Knife Fight and the closer Victory March having more than just a little of an oldschool Digital Leather feel to them.
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.
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.
This NYC group has been around for a good while actually even though they only really caught my eye with their excellent 2024 Zinger LP, which channeled the common aesthetics of their looser, scrappier-feeling previous works into a more coherent and exciting package. Their newest EP continues on that same pleasantly anachronistic trajectory mixing fuzzy garage punk with lots of late-'80s to mid-'90s College-/Indie Rock- and (proto-)Grunge-informed shredding, even though the too-disjointed-for-its-own-good quality of the second tune Cutie - putting in way too little connective tissue to truly breathe life in this disfigured tiny creature - really threw me off for a moment. Anyway, everthing following that feels a lot more organic and sensible here and if that certain brand of oldschool slacker punk is your kind of jam, this is yet another worthy jolt of energy for ya!
This dude based in Cincinnati has five catchy and explosive garage punk, power- and noise pop nuggets for us on his debut EP bookended by two undeniable knockout tunes roughly in the vein of old Marked Men, Sonic Avenues, early Mind Spiders, Bad Sports or Steve Adamyk Band, while the middle part branches out a bit into more relaxed midtempo territory with some surf twang getting infused into a piece of '90s indie-/slacker rock in Dock, a bit of eighties Flying Nun pop running through Acid Angel and the Psychic TV cover tune God Star doesn't shit the bed either. All in all, a freakin' enjoyable little package and i could definitely use more of that shit.
A number of recent releases heavy on re-recorded tunes already hinted that Lansing, Michigan's prolific creators of fuzzed-out noise pop, fuzz- and garage punk miniatures were due for a bit of a sonic overhaul and in keeping with that direction, their newest EP starts out with yet another reimagining - maybe their most drastic one so far - of their old staple ABV, stretching things out and slowing 'em down a bit to better bring out the catchy melodic qualities of the tune without losing any their special magic. This shit still sounds unmistakably like a Snarewaves record, just a gently uncluttered and less hurried one with more breathing room granted by both its performances and production aesthetics. Love it, looking forward to more of it as always!
This Springfield, Illinois group has conjured up an insanely tasty and addictive debut EP here that, despite a tiny bit of a Rudimentary Peni-esque death rock-ish vibe early on in the opening tune The Stain, quickly settles into an oldschool niche located somewhere on the melodic fringes of the mid-to-late eighties punk landscape including a good bit bit of pre-'90s pop punk goodness á la Fastbacks, still unaffected by the genre's later disposable sameness but rather grounded in refined, classic pop songcraft. Another valid comparison to describe this shit would be the recent EPs of Montreal group Psychic Armour, minus their heavy metal influences.
Last Year's Epoxy River and Super Pool LP by this Evesham, New Jersey (presumably one-man-) group was already such a massive leap in quality for them and yet again, they manage to considerably refine their sound on this newest LP, on which they kinda leave behind the late-2000s fuzz punk and noise pop ingredients that dominated that record and lean even more into the oldschool '80s and '90s college- and indie rock-informed sounds ranging from classic Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh, Bitch Magnet and early Seam to the likes of Superchunk and Polvo, with just a subtle hint of first and second wave emo thrown in for good measure but also increasing amounts of '80s hardcore-based proto-noise rockers like Flipper, Big Black, Drunks With Guns and No Trend, especially in the final stretch of the record. There's an unpredictable quality and an explosive, uncontainable energy to these tunes, radiating the pure untamed joy of blasting a euphoric and abrasive, larger-than-life and kinda anachronistic type of melodic noise out of your gear that feels pleasantly out-of-place in this era, all of it further thrown deliciously off-balance by the ear-piercing screams that prove this dude still ain't ready to half-ass anything here.
