Not too long after the recent During 7" on Chunklet Industries (a full length of that group should be expected drop soon) we already get to hear another group featuring Spray Paint vocalist and guitar player Cory Plump. As Rider/Horse he's teaming up with a dude named Chris who has in some unspecified capacity worked with the likes of Les Savy Fav and Trans Am. Together they're creating a sound that's taking the more electrically driven vibe of the most recent Spray Paint releases into a dark and hazy, heavily industrial-leaning psychedelic nightmare kind of realm somewhat reminiscent of Exhaustion, Haunted Horses or Danyl Jesu, as well as the dub-infused soundscapes of Exek, with whom they also share that certain taste of Swell Maps.
Guadalajara, Mexico group Mess recently put out yet another EP whose totally unashamed oi!-ness is, to be perfectly honest, a bit too much for me to bear. This more post punk-leaning two-track digital single they released just a week earlier is pure gold though.
Having released a somewhat hit-and-miss debut tape last year, the Berlin group's newest LP shows off a considerably matured, heavily roots- and folk-influenced flavor of post punk whose overall vibe echoes the americana-/cowpunk of Angst while also evoking with a bit of post-Miami Gun Club and solo Rikk Agnew. Among their contemporaries, you might compare them to groups such as Jackson Reid Briggs & The Heaters and Low Life. Other times, like in Reanimation, Pissing and Look Of Disgust you can sense a certain british invasion-style melancholia with hints of The Resonars or The Bevis Frond. So in a nutshell, this ain't quite your average selection of ingredients for a punk album… which kinda makes this a perfect fit for Erste Theke Tonträger who, as i just learned, are gonna be handling the european vinyl release of this beauty.
Barcelona group Algara initially burst onto the scene last year with a four track demo as an electro punk duo, which then quickly grew into a four-piece group and promptly released another tape consisting of a re-recording of the first EP's songs as well as some tracks meant for their first longplayer, which we finally get to witness in its full glory now. In the meantime their sound has evolved into a compact and effortlessly flowing fusion of post-, garage- and electro punk that might be described as a mix of ISS, Straw Man Army, Rank/Xerox and UZS, only broken up right in the middle by the strong synthwave flourishes of Hedonistas.
Doesn't look like these texans are gonna run out of tunes anytime soon, having just cranked out their second album over the course of just a few months. Thankfully the mix is a bit less tinnitus-inducing this time while the new songs seamlessly continue the wonderful chaos Big Bopper established earier this year, made up of post- and garage punk, noise- and math rock elements roughly in the vein of Patti, Rolex, Cutie, Mystic Inane or Brandy, plus some traces of early Minutemen.
In an act of criminal negligence i somehow failed to post any of the previous EPs by Smirk, the solo Project of Nick Vicario whose other groups Public Eye, Crisis Man and Cemento might ring a bell with regular visitors of this blog. After both EPs were compiled into an LP by Drunken Sailor Records earlier this year, we already get to enjoy his newest extended play via Total Punk / Iron Lung Records on which his ultra laid-back though never sleepy take on sample-backed garage punk sounds the most mature yet, more to the point and catchier than ever before.
Some weird-ass shit, this archival release containing the complete recordings, made in or around 2016, of a short-lived Brisbane group… and of course it doesn't take a fucking genius to figure out this is yet another project revolving around eccentric avant-garde guitar torturer Glen Schenau of Kitchen's floor, plus two other dudes who played in Sydney 2000 and Piss Pain respectively. It might be their involvement rendering this stuff almost approachable for a Schenau-related artifact, although by approachable i mean: No more approachable than, say, early The Fall or Membranes records are approachable. If that sounds approachable to you, then this will too!
A Cleveland, Ohio group presents a rough and dissonant mix of noise rock and post punk with a sharp garage edge on their first EP which, in the current music landscape, positions them roughly inbetween such Groups as The Cowboy, Spray Paint, Flat Worms and Plax, at times supplemented with a certain Flipper vibe.
I don't think i ever gave Berlin's mystery act Heavy Metal the full spotlight on here and in retrospect i can't really tell if that was because Heavy Metal weren't quite ready for me or 'cos i wasn't quite ready for Heavy Metal. All i can say is i've been monitoring their curious and prolific trajectory over the past few years and with every release their garage-/electro-/totalfuckingnuts-punk bastard concoctions resonated a bit better with my broken brain until finally they hit a prefect sweet spot with their fifth (duh…) longplayer on which they come off kinda like a more out-there version of a certain North Carolina group that's been rumored to not be punk enough for heavy metal or something… thrown in a blender with a healthy dose of Swell Maps or Métal Urbain/Dr. Mix & The Remix. Never before have they sounded this nebulous and just wrong in all the right ways, except maybe for the idea of fighting the devil… that simply doesn't strike me as the most heavy metal thing to do. It might please the christian rock crowd, though.
A kinda unexpected and excellent music submission came in here by a group from Zagreb, Croatia playing a variety of dark oldschool post punk with a very slight goth edge, reminding my at different points of contemporary groups like Daylight Robbery, The Estranged, Primitive Teeth, Anxious Living, Criminal Code or Xetas while of the old guard, there's certainly some Wipers-esque guitar work in there and maybe some mid-80s Naked Raygun? In the second half of the album, things get increasingly more melodic, gaining some kind of melancholic Leatherface-, HDQ- or mid-to-late 80s Government Issue vibe.
