Power pop aficinados might already be familiar with Owen Williams as the singer of The Tubs, who stood out earlier this year with their excellent Names 7". Cotton Crown is the name of his solo recording project whose debut cassingle inhabits much of the same awesomeness but enriches its two oldschool pop tunes with more of a goth and new wave aesthetic adding just the right amount of low-level cheesyness to elevate, rather than water down the material.
Once again stupid me was way too late noticing that a new record by Cincinnati, Ohio's pop wizards Vacation has hit the shelves via Salinas Records, repeatedly proving their knack for crafting refined jewels of melodic noise at the intersection of oldschool nineties-style indie rock, graceful power- and noise pop. This shit is catchy as fuck without ever getting too formulaic or predictable. A rare breed these days and even more rarely does it ever come across as powerful and flawlessly executed as here. An album of twelve hits and zero misses as for this group, "pretty good" simply doesn't cut it.
No wonder this shit feels familiar. The Wind-Ups is a new solo project of none other than Jake Sprecher of Terry Malts and Smokescreens fame. Much rawer and louder than any of his other groups have dared to sound recently (albeit not quite reaching early Terry Malts levels of speed and fuzzyness), this at times sounds like a fusion of Terry Malts' melodicity with slightly post punk-leaning garage groups like Tyvek or Parquet Courts, while in other moments you can sense a breeze of The Spits, Ricky Hell or anything Reatard(s)-related. Yet when he goes all-in on power pop, there are some undeniable british invasion vibes emanating from his arrangements and compositions.
Speaking of the devil… here's the latest venture of the mighty Warttman empire and it's yet another beauty to behold. Four rough gems of catchy garage punk and power pop that, of all the Warttman-related groups, reminds me most of R.F.M.C. and Satanic Togas, albeit with a certain southern rock (in this particular case… southern what, actually??) bent bearing some similarity to what you heard on early Sheer Mag EPs.
Let me be blunt here: You guys wanna convince me to pay the equivalent of ~4,60€ for a digital download of only two songs, those two songs better be fucking brilliant. Luckily, fucking brilliant is exactly what these these two tracks by some Tokyo group are. Ka-ching!
For every purchase of this nice little cassette put out by our favorite incorporated purveyors of innovative discontinuity you also get a free fake origin story. 1982 my ass, this is of course still the same dude who did this other thing a while back. Though his newest output contains a bit less weird fuckery, it makes up for that with a lot more fuzz, more melodies and negative zero production values that sound just right to my ears.
Here's a holdover from last week by a single Milwaukee dude (i guess) that i first planned to omit here but on closer listening turned out to be much stronger than i initially thought. A catchy, dreamy, melancholic blend of lo-fi noise pop, organ-and-synth punk unfolds on these tapes that also radiates a good deal of oldschool Flying Nun-type psychedelia.
Nice surprise indeed, this lathe cut 7" debut by some Austin duo making catchy noise somewhere in the realm of power- and garage pop. Especially the killer A-Side I'm Old will no doubt be a feast for fans of bands like Tommy & The Commies, Bad Sports, Radioactivity, Cheap Whine or Sonic Avenues.
New shit from this Kitchen People-affiliated Melbourne garage project. The A-side presents a sparkling power pop gem reminiscent of Liquids, Satanic Togas or Datenight, while the B-side continues the direction of the previous EP - the kind of quirky & snappy garage punk you might assiciate with the likes of R.M.F.C., Set-Top Box or Research Reactor Corp.
Mat Williams' solo project Liquids has been around for a good while now and every new entry in his by now pretty substantial discography has been a pleasant, albeit inconsistent experience, as many of his releases felt like rather loose collections of material with varying degrees of quality. That's not the case at all for Life is Pain Idiot, his strongest collection of songs in quite a while. With Erik Nervous once again working his producer magic here, new stuff blends in perfectly with what i consider to be the definitive versions of songs which already appeared in some form on one of his previous releases.
