Whenever Billiam does shit, it's Billiam week, all week. There's just no way evading the insane allure of one of current garage punk's brightest luminaries who's often getting tagged with the eggpunk label (including by me) and really, probably can't be evaluated in full isolation from that whole mess but also never quite fit into that template all that neatly and frictionless, more often than not feeling way more grounded in an earlier era of quirky garage- and synth punk that preceded our contemporary eggosphere, frequently more Ausmuteants than Prison Affair and chances are, when the genre bubble finaly deflates giving way to a barren eggpocalyptic hellscape, Billiam's just gonna emerge out of the rubble, shake the dust of his sleeves, light a cigarette Snake Plissken style and hum a new tune about the structural integrity of high-rise buildings into his bizarre nuclear-powered steampunk dictaphone on the way home. Anyway, it's Billiam week again and his new LP is a good one, who woud've thought? Engineered by Checkpoint's Erik Scerba (not the dude's only contribution you'll see posted here this week), this may well be the tightest and punchiest a Billiam recording has ever sounded, though thankfully the added fidelity doesn't try anything untoward to sand off his trademark rough edges and eccentric flourishes in these twelve new tunes that once again show off the guy's unfailing, inventive song-crafting abilities, all the while sounding unmistakably like himself yet also never failing to come up with some neat surprise just around the next corner. As a DIY genre auteur he's kinda the equivalent to that certain kind of well-regarded genre director you know is gonna make a certain kind of movie but you also have a well-founded trust in their skills and creative vision to know they'll still surprise and thrill you in unexpected ways every time.
I was a bit anxious about the second Narkose LP 'cos i just loved that previous record so much but knew full well the exact same thing wouldn't work a second time around and it felt like kind of a gamble if and how this group could change things up without losing the essence that makes them so special in the current german punk landscape. Glad to say they found a way to make it work! Some slightly slicker production values give considerable structural support to their sound dialing down some the dark '80s anarcho vibe in favor of a tiny bit more contemporary sounding post punk and -core vibe with tunes like Keine Ziele kinda transporting a bit of that 2010s british post punk and noise rock school that was flourishing in the years before the current hegemony of slick broccoli-haired mumblecore punkfluencers won out in the hype war. The equally heavy and catchy-ass hooks are hitting more precise than ever before here, with the reasonably tidied-up aesthetics laying bare an increasing Wipers-feel to the guitar work of these tunes while the lyrical content is still among the most bleak, concise and well-considered things you'll find in german languange punk right now, rubbing salt in the wounds of a rapidly unravelling europe with a bluntness and urgency that may sometimes just feel like a bit too much if it hits you at the wrong moment but really, it's just the constant background hum of a fracturing society any conscious mind has to cope with right now anyway and basically there's always some healing force to the cathartic energy that unfolds when some dudes of way superior lyrical abilities compared to the petty standards of a notoriously dumbed-down and linguistically challenged deutschpunk landscape, just refuse to mince any words here.
To be quite honest, the discography so far of this french-german group who've been goin' for over a decade by now has been a bit of an unfocused mess at times with more recent releases often missing the determination and never quite reaching the heights of their 2019 War On Words Vol. 1&2 tapes so i didn't expect a whole lot going into this. I'm all the more pleasantly surprised now 'cos on this new one, Warm Swords sound like they mean fucking business more so than ever before, keeping their eccentric ideas and eclectic influences but shaping them into way more tangible, compact and structurally sound little units that are a lot easier to make sense of. The opening salvos of Mirror and Parasite are solid examples of borderline egg-ish art-, synth- and garage punk already but it's with the hypnotic spaced-out post punk of the third tune Friction when the real meat of the album kicks in and just won't ever drop the ball for the rest of the LP, all the while entering different territory with each following tune like the new wave-ish power pop vibes of Save Your Mother, the oldschool Useless Eaters-isms of C-Side, the laid back folk-ish jangle excess of Shortcut Through The Mountain, some lost-in-space claustrophobia in The Anarchist Threat ... the delights and surprises never cease on this overflowing bag of treats . At this level, i'm truly stoked for the next ten years of Warm Swords.
This Bay Area-dwelling group entered the scene with a bang when their 2021 debut cassette dropped and their second LP Instant Pop Expressionism Now! then only further affirmed them as a driving force in the current art punk landscape, which is not all too surprising really once you notice we're dealing with folks who, mainly in the previous decade, have been dabbling about in groups like The World, Andy Human and the Reptoids, Rays and Violent Change. Their third longplayer out via Siltbreeze Records now feels a lot more rustic and brittle than their predecessor, relying heavier on odd iterludes while going lighter on immediately catchy hooks and moments but it's exactly that kind of frugal stinginess that actually makes this record all the more enchanting and rewarding by adding a certain layer of early The Fall-esque repitition that really starts to kick in during In Any Case, and a signature refusal to serve the listener any easy payoff or comforting resolution to the built-up tensions, dissonant loops and patterns. The dub flourishes and techniques in Where The Dream Dwells then have more of a Swell Maps feel to them and maybe, in more recent years, the early works of Exek. Flash #1 on the other hand seems to give extensive tribute to Wire as it could well fool you into thinking you're listening to an excellent Pink Flag outtake, with a bit of a Television and Fall vibe tacked on for good measure, after which Embankment Terror ventures even further into the more pop-oriented side of that early Wire era. So yeah, once again this sounds like a representative round-trip through much of old british DIY- and art punk at times with groups like Mekons, Desperate Bicycles, Membranes, Television Personalities and the aforementioned Swell Maps and Wire coming to mind but at the same time, these tunes have a lot in common with a newer breed of art punk acts aswell in the vein of Cuticles, Famous Logs In History, Onan Servo, Toe Ring and Germ House just to name a couple of 'em.
After the first three Installments of the Amateur Hour series on Fuzzy Warbles Cassettes have all been veering more toward the experimental and indulgent side of things, the fourth volume done by Piss Ants really breaks the mold with a number of simple, straightforward garage punk smashers, jangly fuzz punk dittys and pulsing synth punk tunes and boy this is so fucking up my alley feeling like a mix between the likes of D. Sablu, S.B.F., Kid Chrome and Jean Mignon.
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.
It's been a couple years since the last EP of this Los Angeles group and clearly their craft has evolved a lot since then as evidenced by ther new debut longplayer on Under The Gun Records, whose somewhat metal-infused hard- and postcore-ish vibes may sound a tiny bit brutal, clinical and jarring to those who fell in love with their previous sound of KBD-heavy, synth-extended garage punk tunes that just happened to sometimes venture into hardcore territory. Heck, there's almost some classic speed metal vibe in the one-minute opener For Now. Thankfully that ain't the sole defining trait of this record and the tightened screws here work in unison with plenty of smarts and interlocking nuance to save the punishing first half of the record from just devolving into a featureless tedious barrage. It's the second half when this record truly opens up though, its tunes letting a lot more humanity and melancholia seep through the cracks, incorporating unexpected elements of psychedelia in the midtempo post punk stomper Gridliock/Flatline for example. The post punk-ish vibes persist through Come Down, before the following uptempo tunes too maintain a comparatively catchy quality as if to balance-out the ultra-grim opening stretch. By all accounts this is a way less friendly, instantly fun or accessible record than what we've heard from the band in the past but it's also no less of a thoroughly rewarding listen if you're gonna stick with 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.
Guess what, it's another eggpunk record and it's one i can totally get behind and boy, have these Cleveland, Ohio folks gained steam and tightened up their performance since the still a bit too loose sounding Digital Distortion EP. And it's more than that though. While that record still kinda struggled differentiating them from the flood of Snooper acolytes, they're really growing into their own here by just embracing the weirdness and frantic energy like, i mean... fuck, Can't Stop may be the first song called Can't Stop in a long while that actully sounds like they can't stop, at least until it does stop quite early and suddenly. Truth in advetising rules supreme here with (I Just Wanna) Be a Ramone being kind of a Ramones tune, Salsa being some twisted kind of salsa-ish thing, Uptight sounding like the most uptight thing on the record indeed. It's just tons of exciting fun all the way through and they save the best thing for last in the form of the epic seven-minute closing tune The Nuclear Option, which seems to draw heavy inspiration from early Uranium Club and Australia's perpetually underappreciated garage punk underdog overlords Electric Prawns 2 rather than from the most ubiquitous suspects of contemporary eggpunk. Good call!
