TRACK | Punter – A Minute’s Silence

5/5 golden merles

Hardcore punk from Melbourne with great scope, focused on the vast rot. The vocals are appropriately raving in a perpetual alarm propelled by an undercurrent of backing hooks and lead guitar melodies that facilitate agreeable ingurgitation.

You’re not going to get a better opening line than “Chuck a piss-up on a grave site” for awhile. The primary concerns explicit in the text are privacy in an era of unbidden observation, militarized police forces, and the general degradation and abuses of the social contract. It’s also anthemic. And it’s also a lot of fun.

From what I can gleam as am imbecile and outsider, the son and dotard of many hungry ghosts, the angle is relatively anarchic, I hope, to the extent affiliations don’t damn you outright. There are expressed concerns with left disunity benefitting the bastards at the alternate extreme. Historical examples are cited as everyman martyrs who have been sacrificed for a world they would be ashamed to have been affiliated with.

Your revulsion will either be directed outward or eat you alive from the inside. As an agent within a system of organized degradation with a capacity for self reflection, exercising that capacity for critique is imperative if there is any hope of remediation. And (and) there’s a lot of good hooks in it, too. Revel, wallow, examine, admire the monolithic guillotine on the cover… come up against the limitations of the medium and maybe discover a door.

$6.91 USD on Bandcamp or vinyl from Drunken Sailor Records.

TRACK | Liquids – Dont Wanna Get to Know You

5/5 golden merles

Solo project of Mat Williams of Indiana, Liquids’ Life is Pain Idiot is beaming, howling punk rock. Too many tracks to feature appropriately, so featuring the first I heard. The album end-to-end holds consistently and admirably steady delivering a series of lean and singed tracks.

That it’s a largely solo effort is truly impressive, no sense of motion or desire is lost in the administered layering. The vocal performance is appropriately clutching and cracking, landing as though live, buzzing over the vehement instrumentation. The vision is readily apparent and highly realized.

Discogs chatter claims a vinyl is in the works, hopefully this is the case. Until then it’s $5 on the digital platform all listening would take place on anyway.