Spitting Image

Spitting Image

Full Sun

Slovenly

***Only longtime and well-connected west coast punks—and any lucky dirtbags, cowboy hat goths, and broken-down romantics who have passed through the sagebrush hills and smoky casino bars of Reno, Nevada sometime in the last decade—know Spitting Image. Unless you heard them on a few small run cassette tapes or 7" records with cryptic art and far-out distortion, or at a party they ritually summon to any warehouse, parking lot, basement, or Great Basin lake shore they can find, you didn’t. But thanks to Slovenly Recordings, who share a hometown with the band and have sought out the finest and grimiest punk sounds from every corner of the globe, the rest of the world at last receives a report back from these scuzz punk art freaks on their deep trip, deep in the desert: Full Sun. And it’s dark, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad trip. Donovan Williams’ merciless drumbeats drive downstroke rippers like “Devils Bloom” and “Still Thing,” and tracks like “Broadcast” and “Plea Dealer” play up the conversation between Jack Scribner’s beating-heart bass and Julian Jacobs’ alternately schizophrenic and soaring guitar. The 12 poems that make up this record pull together the stranger fringes of the ‘80s wave—Wipers, Gun Club, Sonic Youth, Television, early Siouxsie—with basement hardcore and hints of krautrock, psych, and industrial that show the band’s “fascination with repetition, patterns, transposing things and ideas into new contexts.” These sounds aren’t genre conventions to mash up and reference; they’re tools to express a razor sharp focus on...