Two notable, more or less dungeon punk-adjacent releases have landed this week. First off, there's the debut cassette of Oslo group Molbo who, on the surface, primarily seem to draw influences from that genre complex of eighties goth, death rock and post punk that's been so en vogue once again for the last decade or so. What sets them apart in that particular niche though is a certain whimsical eggpunk aesthetic, a sense of joy and fun not often found in an otherwise often overky self-serious genre, though admittedly this can at times have an unintentionally comical effect as well.
Ipswich, UK duo Kerozine then approach a vaguely dungeon-esque aesthetic from a more straightforward yet delightfully noisy synth-/electro punk angle that's every bit as driving and hard-hitting as it's catchy, the best reasonably recent comparisons i can come up with right now being the likes of Spyroids, O-D-EX, Drýsildjöfull, Channel 83, C57BL/6, Expose and Beef.
Coming off their unwieldy two-hour Lo-Fi garage-/post-/eggpunk monolith Prawn Static For Porn Addicts from last year, the Moffat Beach, Australia based group returns with a couple of comparatively Mid-to-HiFi sounding singles and EPs. All three of them reinforce my assessment that was already evident on their predecessor, namely that these folks just write kickass tunes, plain and simple, which don't really need to hide behind a wall of low fidelity gunk and grime and can be made to work in pretty much any shape and form. I like my things sounding kinda scruffy and crummy though and thankfully, here they pretty much hit the sweet spot concerning that.
After a somewhat mixed bag of a cassette four years ago and a string of collaboration EPs with the likes of Eyes And Flies, Science Man and Ricky Hell, the newest album and accompanying extended play cassette of Buffalo, NY group Nervous Tick and the Zipper Lips sees them returning at their most focused to date, their mix of post-, garage- and synth punk with just a slight hint of industrial coming across like a decent middle ground between, say, Droids Blood, Beef and The Spits - far from reinventing the wheel here but always energetic, catchy and effective.
iPad Baby of Glassboro, New Jersey first came to my attention with a fun little debut EP last fall but their newest EP/mini-LP thingy is just a so much stronger, more consistent effort in which they dial the weird energy and creativity up to eleven, coalescing into a new lump of completely off-the-rails insanity sure to please discerning fans of all kinds of other unmedicated, beautiful trainwrecks in the realm of Egg-, Synth- and Garage Punk as done by the likes of Zoids, The Gobs, Mateo Manic, Prison Affair, Metdog, Nuts or Nubot555, to name a few.
A bucketload of unhealthy sugary joy, the second EP by this NY act delivering a quirky and catchy mix of synth- and garage-, art- and eggpunk that skillfully and precisely hits kind of a sweet spot inbetween the sonic worlds of, say, Metdog, Smirk and Cherry Cheeks, more or less. Good shit!
A new EP by the San Antonio, Texas group and as always i'm happy to say that Sex Mex still sound very much like Sex Mex, their mixture of garage- and synth punk, noise- and power pop transporting the aesthetics of only the most catchy and melodic artifacts out of the whole Reatard era. Reliable shit that doesn't try anything funny and instead just delivers on the hooks!
The EP suffers from non-embeddable bandcamp disease, but you can listen to the whole thing over at their bandcamp page.
New shit by these Olympia, Washington Lo-Fi punks and you kinda know what's gonna hit you: More of that deliciously blown out and catchy-as-fuck garage-/electro/fuzz punk dementia for the moderately desensitized mind, hellbent on damaging your speakers, corrupting your soul, spilling your booze and puking on your carpet. Very negative influence these kids, stay away!
Following up on their much rougher, hardcore-leaning International Heartthrob EP of last year, Indiana's Spewed Brain take their sound into a catchier, slightly egg-ish direction on their new LP while staying delightfully fucked-up and unpredictable, at different times reminding me of groups as diverse as, say, Trauma Harness, Print Head, Exwhite, The Gobs, Snooper, Rolex, Witch Piss or Slimex.
Following their perfectly appetizing (and as far as i can make out, completely vanished off the face of the internet by now) Black Box EP in 2022, we get this group's debut full-length courtesey of Dirtnap Records and this time around, there's actually some tangible background info available. No wonder these folks sounded familiar the first time around, since we're dealing with a duo consisting of US garage punk royalty Mark Ryan (most notably of Radioactivity, Mind Spiders and Marked Men) and Micah Why, whose previous bands i don't think i've ever come across. Their minimalist synth punk certainly has retained some of that Mind Spiders vibe although this shit is a lot darker, more stripped-down and abrasive, having a certain oldschool vibe to it wich echoes of Minimal Man, Nervous Gender, Screamers, Units or Visitors but you might just as well compare them to more recent phenomena like Powerplant, Pow!, Spyroids or a somewhat less spikey version of Lost Packages crossbred with the digital insanity of Nubot555, the more minimalist moments of Digital Leather.
Alrighty, so here's a new Billiam record doing all the awesome tricks a new Billiam record's supposed to do and by now i'm sure you've long since made up your mind about the dude and whether you love or hate his schtick - kinda the musical equivalent to a Wes Anderson flick i guess. I'm firmly in the "love" camp concerning both Billiam and Wes Anderson though and even if they'd both just continue to re-make that exact same kind of film/record for the rest of their lives, i can always take one more of that!
