Month: February 2025

TRACK | Shrapnel – Catch You Out

5/5 golden merles

New external stimuli, Shrapnel’s “Catch You Out” is the sort of opener that lets you know you are in good hands for the remainder. Tones that mirror the nascent grit of becoming: yolk and seep, the assembled tribunal, that strange pounding as it echoes through the wall of your egg.

There is a community, an archive and an arbiter of it, “they say / you’re stumbling through the dark.” The cadre of informed have determined you are lost. These second person pronouncements casually accrue.

They continue:

“Benevolence / is scratching at the door / how is your innocence / your biggest flaw?” Rhyming door and flaw is something possibly only an Australian could amicably get away with. But we’re in luck. Also glorious: the enjambment as manifest by melody and tempo.

I’ve labeled it lo-fi/garage, but that’s not exactly or even really or even quite true. The textures are nuanced, dense, crinkly and sculpted. To anybody supping from a similar gulch and chewing a similar sediment, the distinction is apparent. There’s a lot of care applied to weighting that sonic range, curating its breadth and character. It’s great.

$10 AUD digital/$35 AUD Vinyl. 300 copies from Tenth Court. That’s cheaper in dollars. As an aside, go and check out “Goodbye Jerome!” by Sillard, Farr and Selnet.

TRACK | Eel Men – Exeter Exit

5/5 golden merles

Great, calloused post-punk-pop from London’s Eel Men, “Exeter Exit” also has enough hooks to easily impale the slipperiest bastards among you.

With lines like, “I don’t care, she’s a friend of mine / lies / we’ve all heard that before,” the narrative form is constructed from varied bits of gently alternating parallax, consistent in tone and neatly accumulating. Characters and corpses alternate momentarily in the spotlight, the storytelling driving at a feeling the author brought back from this place.

I wrote about Intro / Ode To Mr Hudson back in 2022, the new material finds Eel Men exploring familiar forms. The knives are sharpened here a bit, the ethereal congealing, filed down into a point. There’s still enough grime around the edges; the same sense of decaying elaboration, artifacts pulled from the earth with the dirt still on. And the fervor remains well intact.

The immense and catching chorus is granted only twice, the authors have enough self respect to limit these applications, when surely seven or more times could be gotten away with. The gentle incongruity of strumming patterns stretching the breadth of the headset also demurs from the predictable. Both are impulses to be admired and ultimately extend the life of the thing by several hard won eons.

Preorder Stop It! Do Something. out March 7th, 2025, from No Front Teeth Records in the UK and Big Neck Records in the US.