In recent years, french Oi! has come to stand for an unlikely level of excellence in a genre that i wouldn’t have put much stock in just over a decade ago. Admittedly, the overall parameters of its current incarnation can still feel a bit samey and formulaic but that’s certainly not an attribute i’d pin on this group from Nantes, whose second full length effort starts out kinda oldschool-ish with a somewhat Gun Club-esque garage vibe and another great but kinda genre-standard punk tune before their songs subsequently take on a more independent and unique quality, more thoroughly exploring – and eking just enough variety out of – the (to be fair, not exactly unlimited) possibilities of the contemporary garage-/Oi!-/post punk framework with enough song-based oomph under the hood to never get tedious for a second.
Jug & The Bugs of Vernon Township, New Jersey have been messing about for a good while by now, along the way having dumped tons of stuff on Bandcamp in varying flavors of garage punk and even the occasional bit of abstract no-wave-ish noise, all of it ranging from rather traditional and oldschool to kinda artsy and elaborate. Their newest LP though feels like the exact moment in which the group has found something of their own voice, transcending their fast-and-loose garage punk roots. And indeed these guys aren’t fucking around here in a tightly focused group effort, some comparatively polished sounding production values putting these elegantly crafted little art punk dramas in just the right light. Right out of the gate the opening track Your World radiates a distinct vibe á la Wire-meets-Dead Boys. It’s Wire in particular though who will come to mind more than just once over the course of this record, in addition to such powerhouses of that whole garage-/art-/post punk axis like Marbled Eye, Ex Cult, fairly recent Institute, Tyvek, Shark Toys, Andy Human & The Reptoids, R.M.F.C., Motorbike… and on top of that, in the second half there’s some unmistakable power pop bent taking hold in tunes like Delivery and Away Today. So yeah this is quality shit no doubt.
New shit from that Cleveland, Ohio axis of smartypants post- and garage punk centering around Cruelster, Perverts Again, Knowso and The Carp, the linking element to each of them being the distinctive “sprechgesang” vocals of Nathan Ward. Now Cruelster have always been the most fun and straightforward rockin’-out entity of the bunch and their newest LP is no exception to that, which isn’t to say by any means that their compact little art punk/-core bursts were any less ambitious, inventive and elaborate… only that Cruelster appears to focus the most on embedding and quantizing (yeah, quantization is a word that springs to mind a lot with any of these groups) their angular zig-zagging hooks into a reasonably friction-less garage- and hardcore punk framework. Fairly smart shit that only sounds kinda dumb – the best of two opposing worlds!
Philadelphia’s TVO already stuck out from the pack on their previous EPs with a make of post- and garage punk that seemed to take uncommon inspiration from a number of groups of the proto-grunge and proto-noise rock era with clear echoes of U-Men, Scientists, early Mudhoney, Feedtime, Fungus Brains, Scratch Acid and X (AUS), to name just a few of the usual suspects. Their new full length debut still has all of the same goodness on board while also gradually steering their ship into a somewhat unexpected direction by drenching their songs in a generous helping somewhat sleazed-up, bluesy rock’n’roll and what can i say, without exception they deliver the songs and tight-ass performances here to make the shit stick and indeed these tunes are a marked jump forward for the group, showcasing an exceptionally tight grip on their always dead-on songwriting skills.
Digital Hotdogs brings us the newest crime of Austin, Texas cowpunk wrecking crew Leche which, way more than any of their previous works, reminds me quite a bit of another Digital Hotdogs mainstay, Trashdog, not so much in terms of their actual sound and more in their hyperactive, disjointed anything-goes approach dismissing or subverting any established rules and conceptions of genre, structure, continuity, reality itself… so yeah this is yet another glorious genre-bending, fragmented mess that can feel like a bit too much of everything at times. But once you filtered your way thruough all the stuff, there’s a really neat single LP hidden in this seemingly indiscriminate dump of a double LP’s worth of material. This is maybe not so much (Trashdog’s) Weezer’s Blue Album and more (Leche’s) The Beatles’ White Album – a bit too long, kinda messy, in seemingly random sequence and it shouldn’t be judged by its weakest parts.
Almost ten years after their last recorded sign of activity, the 2010s San Francisco garage punk mainstays Useless Eaters are getting the band back together and sound more determined and explosive than ever before, as i was already lucky to witness on occasion of their absolutely unreal and intense Cologne gig earlier this year. Now on their first new recorded artifact – available digitally already with a 7″ release expected sometime via Goodbye Boozy – they’re killing it once again, in some way continuing the spaced-out, kraut-y and post punk-ish psychedelic leanings of their most recent couple of releases pre-hiatus, propelled forward in an insanely tight, dense and unrelenting performance in which every little detail seems to fall perfectly into place with sleepwalking ease and certitude. Awesome to have them back!
Whatever this Cleveland, Ohio group conjures up on their newest EP always carries that certain air of sugary fuzz punk and noise pop, the varyingly Primitives-informed kind that had a bit of a resurgence in the previous decade with such bands as Feature, UV-TV, Slowcoaches, Monster Treasure or Male Bonding and has been kept alive in more recent times by the likes of Private Lives, Exo and Glitter on the Mattress among others. And what should i say, this shit is every bit as good in its ultra-catchy song substance and has a couple of neat flourishes and surprises to boot, like some mid-to-late-era Hüsker Dü vibe in Here We Go Again, while the slightly Wipers-vs.-Wire-esque sounds of the closing track Symmetry also make me think of a slowed-down version of Nervosas or early Milk Music.
Now these chaps are from Spain yet their sound rather makes me think a whole bunch of predominantly french bands, their sound sitting inbetween the coordinates of post punk and -core, melodic garage punk and Oi!, calling to mind the likes of Youth Avoiders, Telecult, Nightwatchers, Bleakness and, most recently, Distance or the french-singing Leipzig, Germany group Laxisme. It would thus be easy to dismiss this as yet another artifact of a recently quite ubiquitous subgenre but that would be kinda unfair and discounting what a massive fireworks of powerful hooks this way-above-average record is setting off from beginning to end.
I gotta admit i had severely subdued expectations for the successor to this Long Beach, California group’s excellent 2022 debut LP, not because of anything actually related to them but rather simply ‘cos sound-wise, they kinda struck me as the kind of group likely to either get too ambitious and bite of more then they can chew or, alternately, suddenly decide that it’s about time to break through to the wider broccoli-haired indie crowd and water-down and gloss-up their sound accordingly. Thankfully, i was so fucking wrong and none of that has happened here. Although like on their debut, you may once again classify this shit as an, on the surface, quite fashionable make of jagged post punk with echoes both of first- and second-wave art punk groups á la early Siouxsie, Delta Five, Transmitters, Pylon and even a hint of Wire, as well as more recent phenomena like Marcel Wave, Spread Joy, Sweeping Promises and Marbled Eye, everything appears a lot more deliberate and refined on this one. While retaining that subtle undercurrent of no-wave mutant funk-ish dissonance, all of these new tunes distinguish themselves through perfectly balanced dramaturgy and dynamic, nuanced song progressions, often dialing down the pace and noise to a deliberately understated appeal, making perfect use of elaborate song architecture to achieve the maximum oomph not by way of sheer force but a mindful, punctual and laser-focused group effort.
There’s more going on under the hood than first meets the eye on this Budapest group’s debut cassette whose eight tunes on one hand – especially in its first half – channel some vaguely oldschool-ish KBD- and garage punk vibes with alternating flourishes of Gun Club and Wipers, counterbalanced by a bunch of way more contemporary sounding elements on which groups of the current anarcho-/postcore-axis á la Straw Man Army and Fantasma have surely left their mark while at many other points, a certain breed of art punk melancholy akin to, say, Kitchen’s Floor and Uniform (Atlanta, not NYC) also shines through.
