Tag: synth punk

TRACK | Cluttered Grotto – Asbestos Sandwich

5/5 golden merles

California bedroom punk with more melodic sense than a hijacked ice cream truck and a voice that sounds like cleaning off your lucky blood diamond with a stainless steel scouring pad. All of this is very good and meant to sound appealing to you, as it does to me. It is the relatively happy bastard child of subversion and invention, driving drum loops draped in human pelts.

Canonical-grade commiseration, it’s seated somewhere among the premier set of atomized and alienated subjects of oligarchy, each in isolation making lo-fi melody-rich synth punk. The craft is immediately recognizable. It’s a competitor, in the top tier. I’ve somehow managed to avoid it like an inverse minefield to date.

The turns are abrupt and appropriate, it mends and mangles in good order. If you are synced up with the wavelength fluctuations of the incessant vibration in dichotomy between deathly serious and inconsequential, it comes as a great relief. It feels a little like driving down a cliffside highway when you unexpectedly smash through a thin wall’s painted vista only to find on the other side not impending death but the true, identical vista itself and above it a prop plane trailing a banner containing the message, “haha, sorry.” It’s that kind of fun.

The EP was found on DJ Simon’s fine Infernal Racket. Really excited to dive into the self-titled from May.

TRACK | Palánta – Éhség

5/5 golden merles

Hardcore synth punk from Budapest, “Éhség” is the 3rd track on Palánta’s super demo. Melodies allocate across the runtime like a fine cognitive dissonance, only in stepping back through the frames and on repetition are we able to admire the whole from outside. While it is not a servant to structural form, it maintains a steady groove inside the atomic levels with undeniable tones and talons. All passion and experiment, what is provided is plenty compelling.

When the vocal hands off the melody 90 seconds in, the relay refines further. Through the strong performance is transmitted a tale of merger through devouring, the escalating and the colliding. There is a metamorphosis recounted, achieved through ritualized abuse or hunger and dehumanization, the conscripted contortions of nature dubbed natural. Sneering and smirking at history, we continue to repeat every mistake, possibly by design.

The set is coming soon in a physical form through SZÉGYEN KAZETTÁK. For now, name your price on the digital wares. Found through the reliable stewards of rock at Tremendo Garaje.

TRACK | DADAR – Desperate

5/5 golden merles

“Desperate” is the immediately engaging opening track on DADAR’s new Italian eggpunk repeater Iron Cage. Gleaming lo-fi synth punk, the track concerns a particularly heavy son stealing away from daylight, pinning himself private in his chamber, shutting up his windows, locking fair daylight out and making himself an artificial night. It is effectively nailing the froth and fever of confinement, self-imposed or otherwise.

The guitars have the proper amount of jangle and bluster, the production consistently owning the excess, everything is gilded in synths. At times it approaches hardcore and anthemic in the vocal ranges, the accompaniment always elevating to meet it in these new plateaus and vistas. A nice fire to gather around, offering commiseration in mutinous hymns.

I am slightly belatedly joining the chorus in bleeding the needle up another notch. I was excited to see it pop up on Tremendo Garaje, KOOP Stronger Than Dirt, and other reliable buyers overnight. When a set of consistent nodes crop up like that it is a very good sign. And the remaining 300 LP discs cannot last long from Goodbye Boozy/Teramo.

TRACK | Catastrophic Dance Ensemble – Panko

5/5 golden merles

The assignment understanders have arrived. What do the rest of you have to say for yourselves? Cincinnati-found Catastrophic Dance Ensemble make rapid, roaming, detailed eggpunk. Gently putrefied, as a measure of gauging its place within the world, and thriving in the rot all around us. Its welts and warp mirror many of my own less convincing accusations; a fiery and balanced form.

In recent surveys most people claim they know when it is appropriate to twist a melody like pulling someone by the lapels out of the window. But in reality hardly 7 in 10 could do it if pressed. Beyond the hypothetical, these Ohioans have done it here. The instrumental backend is even an excellent melodic tumble, all of it finding some much needed humor in the hemorrhage and goes some way toward explaining why we can’t have nice things.

In league with the good goings on of Leipzig, Berlin, Melbourne and Montreal, the Cincinnati punk rock scene is strong, it seems, from afar. If you’ve recently granted positive appraisals to egg and experiment kings like Mesh, FIVE BUCKS, and C.P.R. Doll, I suppose this would be an easy affixation. Name your price at the bandcamp.

TRACK | Belly Jelly – Half Fluorinated Man

5/5 golden merles

From the neonatal subsection of the Discontinuous Innovations Inc. archives, 2022‘s The Universal Language is a cohesive wreck of a record. Certified synth punk, it has leaky guts. It has a kind of belligerent whimsy that seems for all intents and purposes indefatigable. It’s probably best paired with eating gravel off an ill-advised grind to save face after some prior cataclysmic blunder; the botches compounding, proudly multiplying.

Make no mistake, it is a corpulent peach of a series, bleeding blood we don’t rightly recognize as such. You’ll break a nail picking some of the hooks back out of your brain. I haven’t technically been the same since, for better or for blurst.

“Half Fluorinated Man” is the pick of that litter for me, it opens with misdirection, some foaming at the mouth before a tall drink of water. Half a century of pop rock is recontextualized as having been a terrible mistake, and all in about 90 seconds. The digital album is $1 USD. The Audio Cassette Tape is $5. These are reasonable requests.

TRACK | The Gobs – Tuffer Than You

5/5 golden merles

Hard to pick a single track off this exceptional Split EP shared between The Gobs and Ex-White. But I’ve settled on the first track of this side, “Tuffer Than You.” It’s exquisite synth accented garage punk, composed of hardened snow scraped out from under the car and built into a brilliant effigy. The production decay is a correcting mechanism, it better represents the environment from which it was derived.

Notably, the reverence is low. The melodies are quality and effortlessly interlocking; it’s bound up nicely in this loaded frame. Free reign is given to some selected tones and the others are curtailed dutifully around the stomp and stagger; together they’re textured/paced to allow the happy suspending of doubt in the murk of it all.

Truly the 4-track split itself will likely end up on the year-end list. The 300 wax pieces have some yet to be disseminated from Germany, $20 to Turbo Discos with shipping is a steal if you have the cash to ship.

TRACK | Billiam – Jenny Destroys Records

5/5 golden merles

From a split with The Vovos, Billliam’s “Jenny Destroys Records” is synth punk that tells a simple tale of destruction well, with heart and animus. The Vocal-synth harmony is unforgiving in its pursuit: heavily hounding, never yielding. In the writing there is a keen understanding of when to rhyme and when to let it slide, suiting the compiling accusations as they grow in conviction.

It’s a great relief to find this frank wrath so built to scale; the track balances absolute parity of medium and message, the scope fitting the melody and method of execution; all of it craven and compelling. Artistry and insolence are the heart of punk rock, but also here add in a bit of humor and a laser-guided melody.

The remaining tracks will be emerging on the 16th of September, preorder now at $1 AUD. The 150 pressing of the vinyl by Under Heat Records will be gone shortly, those not already smashed or scratched by Jenny the cat. rip.

TRACK | Freak Genes – Strange Charm

5/5 golden merles

“Strange Charm” arrives in a set of consistently plumbed concepts and a larger narrative fixated on the veil, particularly in a Bostrom/Boltzmann sense. And there should be more of this in the world as we know it, simulation or other, because it’s just so damn much fun. The track is composed of sheer keys and guts, synth punk with fervor as the foundation, maniacally forecasting the intricacies of an artificial future.

In the manufacturing of a new and immediate heaven there will be gradients of adaptation and those left behind, some willingly. “Energy bars low above your head,” a beach devoid of touch: the details are effectively populated.

There is within these elements a great deal of world building done (–about world building), new classifications and clearances, presaging emerging rifts that we only have the slightest direct precedents for, despite very familiar themes. It’s full of playful prescience and with enough hooks to convince you to gladly remain and be absorbed within the futurist subject matter.

It arrived today and is fully streamable: there are vinyl variations in limited runs for $20-22 from the esteemed Feel It Records; suitably the digital version is name your own price.

TRACK | Lassie – Temporary Cemetery

5/5 golden merles

Lassie makes infectious Leipzig-based synth punk with all the skill stats buffed and tethered together. Nothing stagnates here or rots in redundancy. In its considered sequences there is utilization of all the accumulate instruments, with key and complimentary fills and every passage reinforced in layered melody. It is fun and morbidly inspired, very well pieced songcraft.

The ensemble of and alternating vocals compliment the energetic roving. On top of that, they’re spewing such fine lines in addition to the virulent chorus, like I don’t wanna choose / Between a job that pays the bills / and a comfort built on kills. And probably in a second language, agreeably putting us grubby John Q. Songwriters to some degree of shame.

I went to link to this very article yesterday and it turns out I hadn’t written on it yet. There are 3 versions that I am aware of (The Turbo Discos single version, the Flennen comp, and the above Phantom Records album version) and they all land depending on how much refinement you prefer. The discography is otherwise relentlessly active, looking at the last several years. I’m excited to see more of the back catalog and what comes next.

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.