Category: punk

TRACK | 208 – Red Cat

5/5 golden merles

“Red Cat” has aggregated all the wasted clipping segments hacked off of more thoroughly manicured garage rock and built a monster of a track/album from them. The momentum built from it pouring from the speakers is a slipstream that makes your escape a little easier. It emulates well a live set at the last concert you ever properly hear.

Self-confessed audiophiles may hear an emaciated range but this is far from it. There is a rich pallet of combustion and deterioration, tonally frayed and saturated. The ideal is in keeping the contours of the collapse in tact, while deriving the implicit energy of its destruction. You can’t properly find the edge without going at least a bit over and it is refreshing to see people working in this territory while maintaining a bridge back to some familiar landmarks.

TRACK | Bleeding Rainbow – Underground

5/5 golden merles

From Pennsylvania-based noise makers Bleeding Rainbow‘s 2010 Prism Eyes EP, “Underground” is bright and radiant rock. Some unique genre contamination in the shoegaze and punk elements and structure, it’s a kind of modular pop chimera. With the aural vocal phrasing stacked in two lanes, the miscellany of influences are always serving foremost melody.

Frenetic, everything pushes constantly forward. There is a proactive panic that elides stagnation, rapidly circumnavigates the drudgery of taking a breath, or pause, or a moments silence. Every vowel is elongated to enwrap the line and seemingly also to cushion the final blow: who can direct us where to go / my mind’s made up / the answer’s ‘no.’

The internet promises that the Hozac discs still exist in the world, and some of which are gold.

TRACK | R.M.F.C. – Feeder

5/5 golden merles

Garage rock from New South Wales Australia, a bit eternal but it feels fresh as a daisy despite all the elements being composed of cardboard cutouts and wax idols. I don’t know the alchemy of it, maybe melt them down in sweat and blood and they become renewed. It works, somehow, divination or some slight mangling or subversion of the cultural conditioning.

Regardless, it’s strong, inventively building and smashing through the effigies. Follow the uroboros either way around and you eventually get back to the guts. The vocals burrow into your skull and bed down there for the night. There are guitar tones that clip in the cathode manner, gently collapsing and fiercely shedding the echoes of its skin in reverberation. It’s good, fun garage rock that elides the rot all around us. The tapes are sold, but it can be digitally got for $3 AUD.

TRACK | Buck Biloxi And The Fucks – In A Million Years

5/5 golden merles

New Orleans punk rockers Buck Biloxi and the Fucks’ “In A Million Years” reframes your petty trials and tribulations on a geological timescale. Ripping through the track with threats and humor, pangs and arbitrary partitions, there’s a freeing feeling to the statement. And it’s stacked in the middle of a great set of pummel and bash.

The drums swat and slug, the late guitar lead diverges ably. The track is concerned with the impending death and the insignificance of adversarial multicellular biological organism, both the ultimate joke and insult those who find themselves embodying the circumstance. It’s all proficiently hammered out in about 71 seconds.

The heralding of our sound defeat is truly a bit of a backhanded insult, with many optimistic forecasts wandering if we make it as a species to next winter. But a million years is excessive for even the most confident futurist/post-human/transhumanist, medically injecting the blood of youths on their Rotterdam bridge obstructed superyacht. And the warped scales are funny but still touch a nerve on those operating as though they are eternal, playfully exposing the absurdity of it all like good punk should.

TRACK | Fili – Tommy

5/5 golden merles

Job For a Cowboy is more tempered fang runoff from Mexico’s Fili, slightly more refined and solemn than Volcom but well within the same anarchic universe of eggpunk and ruthless hooks.

Pleading from a punctured lung, the kind of good ooze you might find emanating among the likes of GEE TEE, Prison Planet, Checkpoint, et al. Look it up if you’ve gladly consumed this discharge, I don’t think your gut biome will reject it.

It’s the brilliant kind of bilge that alienates the right sort, keeping melody in the pocket and pathos near enough to be called upon as needed. Cowboy is a 2022 release that’s definitely competing for the glory and prestige of this humble blogs year end list, cloudy and combustible stuff.

TRACK | Fili – Automatic

5/5 golden merles

Lo-fi garage thrash from Mexico, Fili’s “Automatic” is my favored track off a real superb, tarnished and smeary set. Egg punk tones and bedroom recording methods combine to contaminate one another, a resourceful and regenerative dossier.

From the intro we are fed the requisite raving through a grit of vocals so tactile they’re practically percussive. A series of small instrumental melodies combine to make one great net that effectively colludes to capture. And all this lovely melding and mashing affixed to the discursive litany, today / i don’t want to be disturbed. The album art alone should warrant a peak; it’s good & fun.

TRACK | Mustard – Sentirsi inutile

5/5 golden merles

Lo-fi Rock from Rome, extracted partially dissolved, partially preserved in formaldehyde and resurrected one day before retirement. A refreshing mastery of tone on this one, rising to meet the moment of a lot of ongoing dialogs in garage and noise as we attempt to make the preceding epochs palatable without discarding them entirely.

That is the negotiation and dialog on offer here, if you are attuned to it or sympathetic to this. It is a love letter that may alienate some of its recipients but will land well with those of similar predilections. Utilizing a few old flourishes and forms, teasing apart the tropes, using the crutch as a cudgel, breaking and building. It is to me very compelling and a lot of fun.

Out on cassette from Spya Sola in Cologne, Germany, and Face Melter. Spya Sola also putting tapes out in the region from Rude Television and Beta Maximo. New but with an already stellar track record — follow their shit if these align.

I was thinking I was going to write about something he’d love half an hour before Groschi/onetwoxu.de, but then there is his smiling face on the Mustard February EP. If you like this style, follow that blog. He has his finger not so much on the pulse of it but one plugged in the aorta.

TRACK | Woolen Men – On Cowardice

5/5 golden merles

Speaking of Portland-based tributes to storytellers, here is Woolen Men with one for the late great actor and writer Spalding Gray. There are many killer phrases exclaiming and examining within: even ten thousand hypocrites / is not an invincible army. A good sequence heaping and revising proverbs in a style befitting the man paid tribute.

The style is a deliberate weaving of bass and lead around the era, the tube amps inflecting the post-punk, active-punk and perpetual pop. In the fills and phases, there’s sensible problem solving and strong arrangements throughout, more metered and measured attention to detail from the Oregonians. It’s a careful blend of viscera and philosophizing with much empathy for the listener.

do you want to stay cool forever / or do you want to burn with love? / each choice has its punishments / each choice has its own reward.

$10 for the vinyl of Temporary Monument from Woodsist. I am so far behind, haven’t spent a minute with 2020’s Outta Reach or the other 2020 single’s club releases yet but looking forward to that period of time.

TRACK | The Taxpayers – As the Sun Beat Down

5/5 golden merles

“As the Sun Beat Down” is an immense opener and laudable origin story, “God, Forgive These Bastards” Songs From The Forgotten Life Of Henry Turner (2012). Superb storytelling with Punk and experimental jazz elements, but beyond the genre, it has fury, fervor, and utter conviction.

A fierce tribute to a friend, embellished in ways that get at the broader truth underneath the reporting. A Plato to Henry’s Socrates, like every post-mortem project, it does emphasize to the outsider the importance of ensuring your own legacy while there is time. But, damn, if your influence works by other means, social and immediate, or whatever the case may be, you would be fortunate to find as impassioned and eloquent an acolyte. It’s a stunning set and exciting monument.

If you want the vinyl it’s like $100 bucks. Or a far more fiscally responsible $4 digital dollars in the format of your choosing.

TRACK | GEE TEE – Mutant World

5/5 golden merles

More common era essential lo-fi punk rock by Kel Mason (DRAGGS), “Mutant World” has all the essential vitamins: it is blown out but remarkably to a more ideal proportion, the synths are sampled from a Godzilla mouth beam, and it contains the unmistakable reflection of your face reflected back in a pool of your own blood.

The track’s a well worked clobbering. Over 81 seconds, ascendant minor melodies combine to accent the the nebulous bulk and vividly this breach is annexed and incorporated into the spiraling form. At the chorus the vocal channels rend apart, tearing across the sound scape. It’s sensed then plotted out with a lot of care and calculation.

It’s a good week for new media. After the JWST release today, there’s a new GEE TEE 7″ out Friday on Goner Records.