Tag: teramo

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 | C.P.R. Doll – Drabness

5/5 golden merles

Australian lo-fi rock super-duper group C.P.R. Doll will have you carving out your own bones and honing them into guitar picks just to play along. If you lack bones or sufficient resolve it’ll at least inspire some passive admiration at the stacked, cascading and careening egg punk melodies and demoniac phrasing. They start small and build things of significance which is all you can really ask for in this regrettable world. The accumulation is a great.

It is one of the permutations of rock I enjoy, with the emphasis on mutation. The attention to detail is superb, and there is a great intention in the solving temporal and spatial logic traps that crop up in any map of the soundscape, thwarting every pitfall, escaping entanglement of dullness either through invention or evasion.

There’s a smash and grab ethos: cut it if off it starts to stale, salvage what you can, promptly grow another limb to replace the one left caught in the snare. Each track is spiraling into control: moving forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always confidently twirling towards freedom.

I am told by tippy top tier punk curator Tremendo Garaje that it is to be made available in the US of A by Under The Gun Records and already sold out of Europe in an absurdly limited 20 copies edition by Goodbye Boozy.