A smart and intricately constructed mixture of Post Punk, Noise Rock and Postcore is being set off by this New York group on this plainly phenomenal demo. There's no way around addressing the elephant in the room though: This reminds me a lot of Straw Man Army - especially of their first LP - but you could do a lot worse than being compared to a band of such stature, right? Friends of Bloody Gears, Faraquet, Meat Wave and such will also get a kick out of this.
In a somewhat unexpected but, all things considered, perfectly sensible move, the Philadelphia group on the cutting edge of the still kinda vaguely defined and developing dungeon punk genre release their first full length effort on the well established, rather metal-leaning label Relapse Records. Thankfully this has precious little influence on their sound, aesthetics and production values, with their newest batch of songs even presenting the group at their grittiest and most Lo-Fi so far, their still absolutely singular, elaborate sonic constructs made up of post- and garage punk, noise rock, postcore, a very slight hint of Oi! and only the most ancient ingredients of proto- and old-oldschool metal remaining obscured by in a thick layer of tape hiss all the time. Yeah, the whole thing sounds glorious i gotta say!
Members of Bib and Nihilistic fit, among a whole shitload of other groups, deliver their first EP here and it's hard to not get excited in face of this explosive force. These are super-solid, mature and elaborate song assemblies made up of a timeless postcore sound which is also perfectly able to slow things down - like in the doom/sludge-leaning excercise Face Down - without boring you to death. Always always a sign of compositional excellence if you ask me. In recent years, we might've heard similar blasts from bands like Romance, Shove, Ascot Stabber, Flowers of Evil or early Bad Breeding.
Members of Diode and Freakees gift us yet another attack of deliciously off-the-rails noise, this time closely scraping past the rough coordinates of post punk, post- and weirdcore. Some repititive The Fall-esque riff leads into pure hardcore anarchy in All the World. Give Me Mine then has a distinctive early Minutemen-meet-James Chance kind of energy to it. Further you might find some traces of Flipper, Saccharine Trust or The Pop Group in there or alternately, you might identify bits and pieces of more recent shit á la Rolex, Big Bopper or Gay Cum Daddies.
A sonic experience wonderfully out of touch with the zeitgeist, crafted by some Bellingham, Washington group. Prime influence here seems to be a whole battery of early-to-mid eighties, loosely SST and Touch & Go-connected stuff - on the more strummy, folk-infused side of things admittedly, but never afraid of spontaneously morphing into short bursts of hardcore punk either. Most obvious amoung those influences would probably be shit among the lines of Angst and Meat Puppets, early Dinosaur Jr. and, secondarily, U-Men, Mudhoney and 80s Scientists, some very slight hints of Dicks and Wipers. Or alternately, you might think of more recent Acts like early Milk Music, Dharma Dogs, Chronophage and Damak.
The Olympia, Washington group's first longplaying cassette, following two equally awesome tapes on the fabulous Impotent Fetus label, still delivers the goods of unpredictable, freewheeling hard- and postcore with additional ingredients of garage punk and mild insanity, stubbornly refusing to fit into your preconcieved notions of what this thing called punk rock is supposed play out like. A fairly eclectic, genre-bending approach which you might, if you really had to, compare to groups as diverse as Das Drip, Warm Bodies, Vexx, Judy & The Jerks, Mystic Inane, Hotmom, Gen Pop or Sniffany & The Nits at one point or another.
This group from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania pulls off a vaguely familiar but nonetheless spectacular combustion of catchy oldschool hardcore energy with some cowpunk vibes to it, operating somewhere inbetween the rough parameters of Germs, Dicks, the early hardcore incarnations of Angst and Meat Puppets, as well as more recent stuff like Fried E/m and Modern Needs.
A neat little yet-to-be-pressed 7" by a Sydney group sounding a little as if a more spiky version of Lithics collided with the likes of noisy post punkers Brandy, the recent noisecore of Shove, a very slight hint of Wipers and the ancient recordings of noise rockers World Domination Enterprises.
Following up on their already quite awesome 2019 demo, Austin group Dregs shift their sound a good bit away from a more garage- and fuzz punk leaning sound, further towards a harder to pin-down mix of influences on the fringes of 80s-to-mid-90s hard- and postcore, among others suggesting the likes of X (US), Dicks or Flipper at some points, postcore groups like Gray Matter or Drive Like Jehu at others while more recent bands like Vexx, Cel Ray, Gen Pop or Little Ugly Girls wouldn't sound too far off either.
Apparently, formerly New Orleans-based group Waste Man have relocated to New York City recently. Sound-wise though, they stay true to themselves on their newest EP, by which i mean they stay unpredictable as ever and keep the listeners on their toes every second in their very own mixture on the intersection of Post Punk, Postcore and slight touches of Americana (the latter are less obvious here though…). Especially notable this time is the six-minute slow-burn track White Horse that plays out kinda like a fusion of early Shellac, Slint, Jawbox & Fugazi.
