Category: Germany

TRACK | Useless Eaters – Dungeon

5/5 golden merles

Regularly featuring on many The Net In The Sea mixes over the last decade, Useless Eaters are punk-noise rock royalty… that is if royalty status was established through a grinding and perpetual merit and not merely hereditary nonsense. They rip through the verses like a hungover langolier might, mighty and amorphous, eagerly resolved to annihilate.

The track is spatially aware of the soundscape in a manner that is rarely realized in the genre, a volley of cannon instead of one. In the thrashing it saliently utilizing the stereo mix amidst the core cacophony of other center-lane and assertive lo-fi attributes. It feels dynamic and so it is.

Kindly reminding me of this excellent track was onetwoxu.de featuring BLNDI with their also superb cover off a recent couple of demos. It recoups well the spirit and introduces its own invention amidst the translation. The original digital is €9.99 or the vinyl is listed for a few dollars more.

TRACK | THEE KHAI AEHM – Tribok Travelling

5/5 golden merles

“Tribok Travelling” is full of cold conviction warmed over with fuzz and camp fire. If you’d like a little more structural abstraction and bit more consistency of theme from your sludgy garage punk, with equal parts murky and mighty, this is a hell of a good shout.

The full album arrives August 13th and it is undoubtedly a fine soundtrack for a dungeon crawler or D&D session. But it should not be limited through exile strictly to these domains as it is also a rich metaphor for the exhaustive oppressions and daunting quests of your own life. Good news.

Tapes are up for €5, I don’t know about the shipping from Karlsruhe, or who you are or where you live, so click the button to find out for yourself.

TRACK | BRAK – Smashed Tape

5/5 golden merles

More lo-fi noise punk from Berlin which seems to clearly be making an era of it, “Smashed Tape” is another corroborating witness to that moment. With feedback as the fuse, frenzied and full of an apportioned insolence, it is the refreshing kind of well-tempered visceral filth that comes arranged in sequences and accompanied by drums.

The track offers a guilty plea as a celebration, the confessed breaking as deliverance. It is a modern post-punk, no-wave, noise rock assemblage, and has the texture of few ounces of name-brand bottled miasma. It falls under the category of those few precious things that as we become inured we also become enamored. We’ll be looking forward to hearing the rest of the EP when it surfaces. There’s a bonus track on the 7 euro tape, out from adagio830 August 13th.

TRACK | GLAAS – Concrete Coffin

5/5 golden merles

Berlin punk rockers GLAAS have released their album Qualm, and this is the formidable lead single “Concrete Coffin.” Kinetic and harshly configured hardcore elements emerge derived in collaboration with members from Clock Of Time, Exit Group, Cage Kicker, Idiota Civlizzatto, Lacquer, among others.

It’s has that fraying and bashing you’d want if you could tolerate a little chaos to reshuffle the deck. The vocal implores from inside the metered mire, considered and class. There are a few brutalist synths fountains populating the general state of ruin. It is this kind of realized honing of dread that we recognize our collective discontent, see it embodied.

That’s a good and worthwhile endeavor. The vinyl is out from London’s Static Shock Records, clear or black, however you paint your windows. Fun, bleak rock.

TRACK | Needle Exchange – Shut Up, Shut Down

5/5 golden merles

Berlin-based punk with melodic surf and garage elements, “Shut Up, Shut Down” pounds about, nimbly refractive, mutinous. The residual discontent is ingrained in the sturdy melody, collecting like soot between the abbreviated rotary of the verses.

Having grown accustomed through regular exposure to either the empty vessel or diatribes devoid of style, for my tastes the balance of muck/bile to harmonious refinement is well weighted.

I have been assuming the title has a reference to Nowak’s 2004 book and poetry collection of the same name concerning corporate greed. If that’s wrong I’ll gladly correct and update it with some other half formed idea. Some used versions of the vinyl run are scattered about Europe.

TRACK | Sterile Cuckoo – The Ghost of Saint Claire

5/5 golden merles

“The Ghost of Saint Claire” has a composition that incorporates more creative tools than most songwriters employ and with more conviction. I’m very fond of these configurations, their sequencing — from field, to shoegaze, to ambient drone — is always dreamy, always threatening to break into bloom. It is mesmeric, captivating material.

Three things primarily pique my interest among its graces: First, the cohesion of its assembled genre influences. Second is the structural invention and pacing. And third is the collaborative element. Each of these involve their own degree of risk and reward.

There is some risk in breaking free from the yoke of strictly enforced genre limitations, attempting to create the more refined/unique niche, and the prospective audience readily available to receive it. Another risk is in leaning into the expanse, allowing the void to patiently fill itself with subtle field and noise cues, breaking the form but maintaining a series of footholds. Yet another risk is in collaboration with others to contribute toward the fundamental ideas and ambiance (orion lake & Antonio Svisa).

But, truly, they’ve all paid off tremendously well here. And, from the outside, that act of crafting feels honest and refreshing, to have honed the influences or held a vision intact throughout. It’s realized to a point that probably none of it seems like risk at all to its progenitor, but rather the only way to properly render the material and synthesize the influences. Listening to it feels a little bit like taking part in that conviction and it is a joyful event. There is much to admire in its grandiose and ephemeral lo-fi textures, and the deteriorating and rising of its well designed phases and fractals.

TRACK | Hanoi Janes – Across the Sea

5/5 golden merles

Joyous but bittersweet lo-fi garage pop, “Across the Sea” by Hanoi Janes is another from the Captured Tracks era of indie rock hegemony, when I first became acquainted with so many peeking widows and voided dogs.

Waves of reverb break against the shore. The approximation of a xylophone stutters, piercing. A heart is thrown across the sea and there’s one final pledge to remain the same.

The overwhelming sense is one of revelry in the time of adventuring. But there’s also a remorse at the opportunity cost of ever doing any one thing, the instead, those left behind, going as opposed to staying: the prospective revelries or troubles on either end.

Very few lines rapidly convey the universal conflict. The rest of the story is told in the tones of tremolo and the rapturous melodies and these speak clearly more to a promising future than the dread of absence or omission.

There are again Discog links for a reasonable price in the assemblage of atoms.

TRACK | Rouge – Aversion

5/5 golden merles

Delivered by Phantom Records on either the day of fools or the day of fooling fools, April 1st, Rouge’s self-titled is a record full of refined rage, defiant sludge and radiant sulk. At just under 14 minutes, the EP is extremely consistent and well crafted work.

It’s a very solid punk/synth EP. Its primary concerns are those of social and bodily autonomy and the confrontation of unjust hierarchies. I like this style and share these worries. If these are concerns you share and a style of music you appreciate, the odds are very much in favor of you liking it, too. Ok?

There are within the set lots of influences piled together from punk, synth-punk, post-punk and surf & garage rock. It is both irreverent to predecessors but reverent to form itself. The primary constant behind the curated veil are the hooks that lend themselves readily to easy piercing.

Surprised to see this only show up so far on the great 12xu and Tremendo Garaje, it’s an extremely easy sell; and the digital album is also listed at “Name your own price.” The least you can do is nothing, but it is also quite easy to do a little bit more.

TRACK | Sneers. – Black Earth Shining

5/5 golden merles

From Rome via Berlin, Sneers. “Black Earth Shining” is a track of woe and woah. What a terrible sentence! But nonetheless true. Nonetheless, accurate. It is morose and glowing.

The singular note and choral monosyllabic chant transubstantiate the early soundscape, teasing the tattered and triumphant. The minimal but staggering instrumentation is soon accompanied by a raw and irrefutable vocal delivery. Ossified and merciless it proceeds in a manner reminiscent of our dear friend Tom Waits at times, in form but also the play with melodic structure and of the appropriately designated repetitions within it.

This is some very keenly constructed hybrid of anti-folk partnered by the tone of doom-core. It is a rarity to find this level of clarity and simmering rage properly incorporated and articulated. It normally vents into another form or genre, and it is more than a little refreshing to find it refined in this manner. Grim, gnarly and a lot of fun.

TRACK | Point No Point – Are you OK?

5/5 golden merles

In these dark times, alongside the great mass of voices demanding to be heard, pleading, there can sometime be a week or more in which I don’t hear anything I like. In these times I think maybe I should back away for a bit, that I’m not in an ideal mental space for processing new material. And that maybe I wouldn’t even know anything good if I heard it.

Then, sometimes, with great reassurance, comes, guided and meditative, a calm voice of distinction and craft. Point No Point’s “Are you OK?” is a tuning fork clanged against the side of the universe, spirited and uncommonly well calibrated.

It is that which is becoming, tangential and tactile, built before your very ears. It contains all the joys and horrors of being known. A tame trajectory, familiar, left unimpeded, that nevertheless hits the intended target. It sounds like the end while discussing the new beginning, which are coincidentally, mercifully, the same thing.

If there’s any future worth having our degraded/spoiled era will be bound up and bundled with the dark ages. But maybe some documents like this will make it out and convey we had a bit of sense and the capacity to craft things of value.