Tag: punk

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 | fizzface – blinking shivering

5/5 golden merles

Intricate Licorice is eminent experimental noise and folk rock from New Zealand. It is also a guide on how to properly synthesize influence through the prism of a personal vision that can still be accessed and appreciated by outside observers. Maybe that’s just a definition of art. But look: some finely wrought phrases planted in murk-laden hooks, and the ambiance and field to capture the greater multidimensional representation of the arbitrarily defined moment.

That amounts to some superb storytelling. There is invention and quality when the artifice of noise cuts prior to the lyric and the line completes in its isolation: my breath is frail / my hands are shaking / a response to what the wind has taken.

Most of magic is misdirection, how to position the observer and pacing. There is great value in knowing what to cut and leaving the next track to begin with a sigh at the outset of the take. Good work and unique voices are exciting and allow for reassessing the fundamentals which are regularly lost sight of for one reason or another. If you are estranged by the strangeness, it’s all there, the heart and pathos, half a meter underneath and more. 5 golden merles in praise of burnt potions, their efficacy, and addendums applied to horizons.

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 | FLASH – Nazkauta Nitxiok

5/5 golden merles

From the Spanish Gipuzkoan coast, FLASH fabricate rabid and relentless noise/punk rock. Careening into a controlled burn of synths and axes, it will get your blood moving forward. It has an enduring wrath and commits to the conundrum, frantically yowling in Basque a mantra of renunciation.

The style is warped and gently deteriorated but maintains its melody, so it rests at the only available precipice to us. Which is to say it is found on the periphery of both major pits (pure indulgence/abstraction or commercial solicitation).

Regardless, the balance is truck. The zeitgeist is favorable to it. The sound squirms from the hand of capital, repelling like a magnet from its grasp, while still affording a refined articulation and immediately resonating. The ground will shift and it will fall toward one side or the other, and down we will go with it.

But for now it’s fun and good. I am looking forward to hearing the remainder of the tracks. The vinyl for the album is black & blue and releases September 2nd from La Vida Es Un Mus Discos.

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 | 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.