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.
Spaced-Out synth punk heroes Cosme of Ciudad López Mateos, Mexico have already slapped hard with everything they did on their three demos so far and now, on their first tape not explicitly labeled as a demo, they simply give us more of the same and what more could i ever ask for if that same is such a freakin' glorious and surreal lo-fi mess of classic power pop hooks colliding with the most melodic branches of mid- to late '80s punk and some new wave catchyness on top. Whatever these dudes touch remains such an insanely satisfying endeavour and so far they ain't showing the slightest hint of slowing down.
Now here's a true mystery band for ya that may well originate from earth's inner core or from Saturn's rings or Bavaria or the nth circle of hell, or maybe i'm just imagining the whole thing i don't know what the fuck is going on here. But in case that shit's actually real, i'll try to describe it as the sort of at best tangentially egg-infused, spaced-out psych punk of the most out-there and deraged breed, the kind you'd imagine being blown through the raptured speaker cone of some ancient haunted AM radio coming alive and blaring away each night in an abandoned shopping mall or hospital building or whatever. Quite appropriately, these broadcasts themselves are about as impenetrable as any old numbers station dispatch, probably unrivaled in the 12XU class of '26 in terms of sheer unsettling disorientation as these tunes appear intentionally set-up to catastrophically fail at any moment in unpredictable ways but rather miraculously, the fragile structures holding things in place here, as much as they keep swaying and creaking incessantly, never quite collapse, but rather even expose a good deal of quite catchy garage hooks under their deep layers of grime and fuzz. Though not completely unheard of in our spheres - i'll say Psychal have a number of spiritual peers in the likes of Zoids, Silicon Heartbeat, Corpus Earthling, Mateo Manic or Thee Hearses for example - you've rarely encountered a specimen of this kind going quite as far in its boundless excess of acid rock depravity.
This South Carolina group's previous This Has To Be Hell EP didn't quite cut it for me yet but this more consistent and fleshed-out successor now is sure worth a post here, a kinda weird bastard inbetween somewhat eggpunk-ish synth squeaks and fuzzed-out space punk of the Corpus Earthling and Zoids variety with nothing terribly new or smart happening here but their staunch dedication to its simple formula just sells this shit for me.
Here's an odd one for you, and i mean that in the most positive sense, coming from a group presumably from Charlotte, North Carolina. The thing starts out as very much of a hardcore record, though even throughout the first couple tunes you can't help but notice that pronounced spaced-out psychedelic undercurrent and an increasingly catchy, melodic quality as well as some top-notch ability of song construction underneath that really goes into overdrive in the fourth track Misery, after which the record then incrementally slows down the tempo with each track and leans even more into an acid rock-driven post punk, postcore and art punk vibe that reminds me a bit of recent Science Man, Optic Nerve and there's even a slight bit of LoFi-era Poison Ruin in Make A Case. Inevitably, the record eventually reaches something of a full-on space rock territory yet retains all of these at times subtly emo-fied, melancholic undertones and ist melodic brilliance and you know what, at no point does this group sound much like anything else around really - the best comparison i can come up with for the second half from the top of my head are the likes of recent Shrudd and some of Electric Prawns 2, but really that's kind of a stretch already. You also may compare the larger-than-life drama of the record's middle section to Tom Lyngcoln's Raging Head LP or his more recent band and spiritual successor to that one-off record, Metho. But none of these comparisons truly stick here. This record is freakin' unique is what i'm sayin'.
Well, it took like a year longer than promised but better late than never i guess, here's finally a new LP of Stockholm's synth punk bulwark that's been around for roughly a decade already. So they've got nothing to prove at this point anyway and simply deliver yet another brilliant collection of spaced-out garage punk delicacies filled with their trademark Devo-isms and bookended by a couple of somewhat John Carpenter-esque instrumentals to underscore the pervasive cinematic qualities of this record, another killer one at that.
Here we have a marvellous debut LP from a Berlin-based group that - after a post punk-ish instrumental intro reminding me in equal parts of The Estranged and oldschool west coast punk of the Adolescents, Germs and Agent Orange variety - mostly settles into a heavily Spits-indebted, occasianally somewhat Ramones-ish garage punk sound enriched with a certain space punk ingredient reminiscent of such groups as Corpus Earthling, Silicon Heartbeat, Stalins of Sound, Zoids and Mateo Manic or, fairly recently, Shrudd, Zulo and Electric Prawns 2, although the aforementioned post punk vibes also return occasionally in tunes like Freiheit and Vittima. Seamlessly glued together by rock-solid songwriting qualities throughout, this makes for a flawless all-killer record getting the optimal bang for the buck out of a time-tested oldschool formula.
Here's yet another new nicho for you that's so top fucking secret you can find it on bandcamp! On the successor to last year's Dining Nothing / Sin Agenda Para La Muerte single, the group from Rosario, Argentinia delivers more of that same greatness drenched in the murky waters of eighties post-, garage- and art punk with an additional layer of fuzzy psychedelia on top that makes this record a neat companion piece to that recent Zulo EP which, coincidentally, has been released just a couple weeks prior on the very same local boutique label, Fake Sex Tape.
Zulo of Rosario, Argentinia have already accumulated a respectable number of LPs and EPs with a varying sound inbetween the parameters of fuzzed-out psychedelic garage punk, noise- and power pop, but never before have their tunes been as consistently awesome as on this new LP on which they lean in on their more spaced-out tendencies, a psychedelic haze enveloping an impeccable batch of super catchy new tunes that at some points may resemble an oldschool Telescopes, Spacemen 3 or Flying Saucer Attack vibe as much as somewhat more recent shit á la Honey Radar, Far Corners, Germ House or Violent Change.
Over the last couple years, Shrudd of Louiseville, Kentucky consistently upped their game with each new release and yet i'm gonna say their newest one is playing in a different league altogether, such an amazing leap from anything they've done before. Where their previous work cycled through numerous subgenres but had an undeniable egg-ish quality in common especially on their most recent bunch of EPs, this one moves way beyond that with the opener M.M.I.T.L. still bearing the closest resemblance to their previous work with kind of a Ghoulies vibe before Stagnant shows the first subtle harbinger of a darker, more psychedelic-leaning overall vibe reminiscent of the likes of Useless Eaters, Pow!, Electric Prawns 2 and Mononegatives, which really kicks into gear with the slightly Powerplant-esque aura of Bodies. EMT on the other hand has quite a bit of a classic blues-y, slightly cowpunk-ish garage vibe to itself, followed by Gift where they're going into full spaced-out acid punk overdrive. And in such a vein it continues, gradually expanding their sonic color plaette with almost every new tune. So basically, here we have the newest example of a band growing the fuck up and branching out from their humble eggpunk beginnings towards new horizons, which i guess is gonna make ex-Lumpy Martin Meyer kinda happy and it makes me quite happy too cos this shit is so freakin' good!
