Whenever Billiam does shit, it's Billiam week, all week. There's just no way evading the insane allure of one of current garage punk's brightest luminaries who's often getting tagged with the eggpunk label (including by me) and really, probably can't be evaluated in full isolation from that whole mess but also never quite fit into that template all that neatly and frictionless, more often than not feeling way more grounded in an earlier era of quirky garage- and synth punk that preceded our contemporary eggosphere, frequently more Ausmuteants than Prison Affair and chances are, when the genre bubble finaly deflates giving way to a barren eggpocalyptic hellscape, Billiam's just gonna emerge out of the rubble, shake the dust of his sleeves, light a cigarette Snake Plissken style and hum a new tune about the structural integrity of high-rise buildings into his bizarre nuclear-powered steampunk dictaphone on the way home. Anyway, it's Billiam week again and his new LP is a good one, who woud've thought? Engineered by Checkpoint's Erik Scerba (not the dude's only contribution you'll see posted here this week), this may well be the tightest and punchiest a Billiam recording has ever sounded, though thankfully the added fidelity doesn't try anything untoward to sand off his trademark rough edges and eccentric flourishes in these twelve new tunes that once again show off the guy's unfailing, inventive song-crafting abilities, all the while sounding unmistakably like himself yet also never failing to come up with some neat surprise just around the next corner. As a DIY genre auteur he's kinda the equivalent to that certain kind of well-regarded genre director you know is gonna make a certain kind of movie but you also have a well-founded trust in their skills and creative vision to know they'll still surprise and thrill you in unexpected ways every time.
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.
JJ Sizza is a dude you may have heard making noise before as a member of australian garage-/post punk acts like Kitchen People and Dr. Sure's Unusual Practice. On his second solo EP he now leans a bit more heavily into catchy-ass power pop territory than we've heard from these groups before and the shit fucking slaps, the opener 50 Cent Coin sounding like it could've either been a lost would-be '80s new wave hit or a forgotten early Flying Nun Records artifact, or also a modern-day garage single by the likes of Andy Human or Nick Normal. That one song contains multitudes already. Hold Music then sounds a bit closer to something out of the Dr. Sure's Œuvre and so does Panopticon Blues, before Skin On Skin combines some classic Ramones qualities with a modern fuzz punk / noise pop-sensibility not unlike Texas groups Sex Mex or, most recently, Eason. The closing tune Don't Wanna See is the weakest point of the record though, it's egg-ish art punk ingredients just not fusing together as well as they should but there's no arguing with the brilliance of anything else on this neat little tape.
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.
It's been a couple years since the last EP of this Los Angeles group and clearly their craft has evolved a lot since then as evidenced by ther new debut longplayer on Under The Gun Records, whose somewhat metal-infused hard- and postcore-ish vibes may sound a tiny bit brutal, clinical and jarring to those who fell in love with their previous sound of KBD-heavy, synth-extended garage punk tunes that just happened to sometimes venture into hardcore territory. Heck, there's almost some classic speed metal vibe in the one-minute opener For Now. Thankfully that ain't the sole defining trait of this record and the tightened screws here work in unison with plenty of smarts and interlocking nuance to save the punishing first half of the record from just devolving into a featureless tedious barrage. It's the second half when this record truly opens up though, its tunes letting a lot more humanity and melancholia seep through the cracks, incorporating unexpected elements of psychedelia in the midtempo post punk stomper Gridliock/Flatline for example. The post punk-ish vibes persist through Come Down, before the following uptempo tunes too maintain a comparatively catchy quality as if to balance-out the ultra-grim opening stretch. By all accounts this is a way less friendly, instantly fun or accessible record than what we've heard from the band in the past but it's also no less of a thoroughly rewarding listen if you're gonna stick with it.
Ever wondered what happened to the dungeon punk genre? In the early '20s it felt like that shit was gonna take the punk scene by storm but today there's no denying that there hasn't been a major genre landmark since last year's Steröid LP... there've been some attempts of course like that Powerplant record which sadly devolved into a tedious mess of half-baked prog fuckery and let's not even speak of the disappointment that was Poison Ruïn's recent too-slick-for-it's-own-good venture into radio rock territory. But anyway, here's a more than worthy genre entry for a change, coming from a group i didn't truly expect to go down that route, even though their more recent artwork subtly hinted in that direction at the very least.
Let's also address another elephant in the room that i just can't stay quiet about and that is the quickly proliferating practice of effectively asking vinyl prices for digital downloads on bandcamp, with a completely ridiculous one-dollar-per-minute rate quickly becoming the norm from certain bands and lables. Cut it out dudes, that's a fucking dick move.
With that out of the way, these swiss dudes have crafted a quite excellent second album that on one hand doesn't add any new elements to the genre toolkit but then again maintains a level of quality and cheesy fun that i was missing from the genre in the previous twelve-plus months. For them, it feals like a natural, organic progression keeping all the catchy qualities of their previous work while seamlessly merging that distinctive layer of ancient heavy metal into their tunes. Not afraid to get a bit corny at times (yet also never too much so), this record delivers a neverending surge of often quite obvious low-hanging-fruit kinds of hooks. I have no complaints here though 'cos that shit just fucking works. S.G.A.T.V. play their shit straight but their steady aim always perfectly hits your primal instincts every single time. The expected age of dungeon punk supremacy is still postponed until further notice but as long as records like this come along every now and then, maybe the genre can at least continue its work by slowly undermining and nibbling away at the dark empire's foundations from the inside.
It hasn't been a massive music week otherwise but at least it's been a decent one for groups whose name ends in -ro which make up a whopping 50% of this week's blog output. Apéro from Hamburg, Germany already left a thoroughly convincing impression with their debut EP Cold Drinks, Cool Snacks last year and their newest EP continues in the same vein of moderately egg-ish, catchy-ass garage- and synth punk, the first two tunes being perfectly cromulent if maybe a bit routine examples in their own right, though it's the second half where this record really comes alive with a barrage of timeless power pop hooks that among other things kinda channel some older Sheer Mag energy.
This Los Angeles group has crafted a deliberately cluttered and disjointed yet insanely exciting mess of a record that seems to take inspiration from old heroes of the art punk world ranging from the likes of The Pop Group, Pylon and hints of James Chance, Pere Ubu and even a slight trace of Wire to their more underground and, potentially, more synth-heavy counterparts á la Minimal Man, Visitors, Neverous Gender... and yeah, quite obviously there's also some Devo DNA embedded in there. Or, in more recent years, you may also find some common ground here with contemporary acts like Landowner, Cartoon or Ismatic Guru. Then again, the folk-ish strummy energy goin' on 0126iii recalls the likes of Angst, Volcano Suns or early My Dad Is Dead. Anyway, there's a great deal of variety and an uncontainable creative momentum happening on this record and even though not every experiment pays off equally well here, with a generous 21 Tunes assembled here i think it's just fair to rate this album by its abundance of hits rather than its rare misses.
This Maumee, Ohio group has some synth-enhanced power pop-ish garage punk goodness for us on their debut LP whose catchy-as-fuck pop nuggets are constantly steeped in a hazy, uncanny atmosphere and covering a quite decent spectrum ranging all the way from old Lost Sounds, solo Reatard or Digital Leather over the song explosions of early Vagues or King Tuff towards quite recent stuff like Monda, Booji Boys or that incredible Emmett O'Connor LP from last year. A barrage of undeniable earworms whose prevalent sense of melancholy more often than not is met with tons of a quite uplifting, euphoric energy.
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.
