Category: punk

TRACK | The Kerosene Hours – Who’s That In My Room

5/5 golden merles

The perfect slice of alt rock paranoia, The Kerosene Hours’ “Who’s That in my Room” explores an inordinately compelling post-punk impostor self-diagnosis. The hooks are immense. The intensity of the lead drives forward the reckoning, while archival samples introduce a series of eerie phantasmal pedagogues emerging as deficient and outmoded council. It all combines to convincingly attest that the observed double life is worth leading.

Octave shifts and echo in the choral arrangements probably foremost, the tune’s construction is extremely carefully designed. Silverstein’s wailing, its range and melodic fervor, is simply gorgeous. The negative space employed and the phasing of discrete components throughout the soundscape is something to really appreciate in headphones.

During the push into the final chorus the modulated synth pulses apply a counterweighted melody after the field loop, adding a welcome variance to the crescendo, escalating the final advance, and precisely taking its own advice (“try to modify the stimulus”).

It’s a great repeater, hard to exhaust on successive listens. Pay what you will at the bandcamp, it is available at the price that you determine. For complimenting media, maybe also check out Bastie, Dehghani, Nkondo et al’s criminally underrated Gobelins short “Lonely Dogs.”

TRACK | Cosme – ♀/♂

5/5 golden merles

More Groschi flagged digi drum gruel,
Cosme’s “♀/♂” has the right balance of grime and pop. Mexico-based egg and post-punk with track titles designed to stymie the algorithm. It features sharp synths. It is agreeably weird and pulpy. If you polish this it would die, the act breaking the barrier needed for breathing the muck it is coated in.

When the primary melody finally releases its jaws the newly minted guitar & synth hook cushions the transition into another form. That sequence kindly allows for a brief recuperation before proceeding into another mauling.

There’s a really fine assemblage of instrumental and vocal hooks then a bit of late-stage discordance on vocoder production that merges them into one. Additional digi-drum variant fills keep it all nice and novel in the detailing, fleshing out the piece. If one were so inclined you could surely dance to it with minimal hardship.

Demo No. 3 is currently $2.70 for the .wav files or $8.50 on the remaining cassettes. Maybe you can in the sequence of your life pair it with Priit Pärn’s “…And Plays Tricks.”

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.

TRACK | Good Flying Birds – Wallace

5/5 golden merles

Indianapolis-based indie garage-poppers Good Flying Birds‘ have released the newly compiled talulah’s tape (21-24). Some sweet and intricate rock music, “Wallace” is my favorite of that set. Just when you thought the world’s desiccated husk couldn’t get any less appealing: whammo, some real fun and charming gas exits from an unknown reservoir. Arriving just in time for whatever horrors lurk just outside our temporal periphery, it’s a great relief to me personally.

A blended approximation of influence might include bits of Kevin Barnes, Alex Giannascoli, Lewis Allan Reed, and the three individuals within the great Grass Widow assemblage. Or just go see what they say for themselves. In either case take it from me, someone dumb and desperate enough to play the lottery: we’re lucky to have these songs.

Wondering through what’s left of the wasteland, it’s my favorite thing out of Indiana since at least The Cowboys. The sequences are arranged as though a human has carefully considered them and intricately compiled their subsections, culminating with delicate intention, maybe bordering on mathrock in some of its steeper niches. It’s careful, thoughtful work. I truly wish them well with whatever happens next after one emerges, budding gently out of the earth. I guess either promptly being stomped to death or maybe something good might happen.

There’s a run of 100 tapes on Rotten Apple, $8. They’ll be gone soon. Please also see the tracks on the Inscrutable Records comp with Answering Machines and Soup Activists.

TRACK | variety – Plover

5/5 golden merles

Variety’s “Plover” is Texan avantpop rock composed of compelling narrative subversion, sticky melody and tone. The hook is a compacted material derived from descriptions of naturalistic imagery, the conflict of the domesticated and undomesticated in comparison to the authors interpersonal dilemmas. It’s thoughtful and pretty dang fun.

I need my streams and mountains tempered by the grim specter of death. Gluck and Johnson, Bly and Ruefle. Some human fingerprints on the felled log, beach towels on the bog, a figure ever-present on the vista to trample and insist.

Whereas at the end of “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” Wright pulls it all back home, a new frame, fitted, variety’s entry point with “Plover” is immediate. But it functions in a similar way. The relationship is described then promptly the tangent turns away, meanders off skyward, the footnote consuming the page. And then another. Relative to the original focus, the elaborated metaphor informs the initial concern, compounding all the more weight.

Two of the greatest modern scouts of imaginative rock have already signed off on the making, Groschi and Doyle. If you’re not already following them, what are you doing here?

The singles are combining into an album to be released in November: bandcamp / name your price.

TRACK | BLOUS3 – Goo Goo

5/5 golden merles

“Goo Goo” is Sacramento-based noise punk with cutting phrasing and instrumental hooks concerning the crimes of Johnson & Johnson. How can a culture appropriately reply to grievous wrongdoing committed that effectively goes unpunished? In spitting their own legalese and cowardice back at the bastards, BLOUS3 gives it a worthy attempt.

Conveying your contempt is a valuable and worthy endeavor in art as well as in life, especially in a land dominated by bribery and payoffs that are supposed to wondrously settle all grievance.

Instead of suggesting through abstraction, the naming of names is also important. The organizations and corporations that transgressed could have been alluded to here, and/or, possibly, spoken of in interviews that some fraction of the audience might have seen, having guilt implied or indirectly assigned.

But, mercifully/vengefully, it isn’t in this case. There’s a real great balance struck between the emotional crux and the testimonial. It’s neither sterile documentation nor an overwhelming howl. The excoriating is finely allotted, richly painted in tone, gracefully moving between contextual parallaxes and recrimination. It makes the wrath fun, compelling stuff.

Of course proper retribution is impossible. The dead are gone. The payout from the case is only a minor gesture, admission of fault (de facto, de jure is another matter), and some sad simulacra of compensation. If we are incapable of acquiring justice, at least let the villains be shamed and the martyrs be staunchly defended and honored. This is on both aesthetic and moral grounds a good and worthy effort.

Mixed into a really agreeable punk slurry by Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden. Arriving shortly on San Fran’s Cherub Dream Records. The track is $1 and the album is $7 on the bandcamp, fully releasing October 4th.

TRACK | Busted Head Racket – Poor no more

5/5 golden merles

Garage Synth / Egg Punk. Newcastle, Australia. I will never in my life make something that sounds this good. Yet the merciless and merciful aspects of our brains are broken in similar if not effectively identical ways with respect to consumption ideals. What can be salvaged from a poisoned music culture and made good again?

We can’t let the bastards entirely have melody. We can’t allow them to curse and butcher the synth that sings, or only allow play for profit. I can’t make what the band has made. I like to hear it. Busted Head Racket are thriving in the new fresh hell.

As far as simulacra that mimic the moment go, it is a course correction. It’s a good interpretation. There’s an adequate amount of noise and degradation applied that substitutes for where it is otherwise extracted in daily, unavoidable consumption. The filth is placed back on the scale, countering the kitsch that sits like a lead balloon upon the other side.

The discordance is like a filter that allows you to see what lingers around you and at all times but is otherwise invisible; They Live sunglasses or Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe quietly mapping all the background radiation. It is encouraging to see. It helps us navigate the world.

What niche allows for such a thing to emerge and inhabit a space and not be smothered or obliterated? I don’t know, there’s not enough, you should probably support it if you are able. Name your price on the band’s bandcamp. Buy the Vinyl on Erste Theke Tontraeger.

TRACK | O.R.F. – wie schön

5/5 golden merles

What can be learned from this? Its direct and graceful descent. Its puncture and pulse. The relaxed raving of the narrations, the chosen selection of attributes as illustrative pastiche. The contents holding enough detail to endear as a sort of half stripped down, functional ruin. And the adequate melodic curvature to facilitate an ease of entry into the canal. Why does it work within the genre when so much else seems to flail about helplessly or sicken or combust when exposed to oxygen?

Probably for some to succeed others have to fail, and en mass; some sad blighted aspect of human perception and consumption: if too many find a balance they become unremarkable and we sharpen the point at which the balancing is possible. And whatever gets caught on that spear is called progress or best of the year, the reward of which is to be impaled and left atrophying in the sun. Also, it’s a nice pop tune and fun!

The track responds to a feeling, irreverence and care balanced out in one coherent, self-contained, 83 seconds of media. It tolerates enough elements of the antithesis to overcome intellectual opposition through instinct. Or maybe it curtails instinct sufficiently in order to compose a pleasing and compatible story.  It is the same game as always. But this is a good attempt. According to me, a man who can just about afford to pay for webhosting.

Either you’ve heard this song 20,000 times before or you’ve never heard it. The limits are in place: lung capacity, coincident rhyming forms of language, melodic coherence processing tolerance, range of audible tone and transmittable frequency, mass production, and a hundred other great filters of pop music. Eventually the plaque of nostalgia will harden entirely around your heart. You can use this as a test to see if the barricade is complete or if some gaps remain for admission. $0 on the bandcamp.



COMP | Este Sinte Mata Fascistas

5/5 golden merles

New compilation from Argentina in the wake of the December inauguration of the libertarian hatchetman and fascist clown Javier Milei. In the absence of simply gawking in terror at the spectacle of a modern state being disassembled and sold for scrap, what can be done? Well, Fichines Ruido Zafarla have put out Este Sinte Mata Fascistas, that’s what. The disc functions as a unified front of disgust and defiance from a collection of some of the nations finest punks.

There’s a good breadth of style to the pieces, from egg and devocore tinged tracks like Valentina & los Bindis’ “Basta” to harder proto punk and hardcore Desborde’s “Hartxs” components. But the spirit remains consistent throughout and pulls from common threads of musical influence and political offense.

In “Basta” saw synths reverberate in a synchronized percussive wave, the chorus a harmonized rallying cry of that eponymous declaration (“Enough!”). It’s great synth punk, melodically sound and structured with playful invention within the coalescing vocal lanes, commiserating formidably with the best of the genre. There is value in mutiny during times of madness, singing about this dissension, and celebrating noncompliance with your friends.

The act itself is valuable but fortunately the record is also exceedingly good. Show a bit of solidarity if you should see fit. The beautiful CD option comes in a floppy disk sleeve, for $3 ($15 to get it up and over to the US), or name your price for the digital files.

COMP | Palestine Solidarity Compilation

5/5 golden merles

The Palestine Solidarity Compilation is one of the most stacked comps of the era and for the cause eating at the conscience of the world. Just look at the list for many favorites of this portal: Billiam, Busted Head Racket, Rude Television, Cool Sorcery, Gee Tee, Cherry Cheeks, and the many and the more, 27 tracks of playful and cursed invention. Further good news, all the included songs are unreleased, demos, covers, or live versions, so you may become a craprock completionist and cleans some small portion of your soul in the process.

Highlights for me are Balaclava‘s “Swimming Up Up Up,” a devocore/egg punk blinder, collapsing with great intention and some real fun melodic subversion in the latter stages. And Moshi Moshi and the Moist Boys‘ “Pitchforks and Torches,” which operates primarily by gallantly gliding its synthpunk guts across the soundscape. There are many new names to investigate here, many I had not come into contact with previously, and this is a welcome introduction amidst much good company.

Give if you’ve got and can afford to. There is thrashing, there is jangle, there is wallop, and all going toward the cause of providing a tiny bit of support for those who continue to face dehumanization and death daily.

Please see the bandcamp description of the album for how to buy (…it isn’t $1,000). Make a donation and then email them directly for a code. Tapes from Idiotapes (EU) and Godless American (US).