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Smirk

Material

Feel It

***BACK IN STOCK!!! As the Decline of Western Civilization comes into full focus, our ears turn once again to Los Angeles. The first proper full length from SMIRK could very well be the soundtrack to a Decline pt. IV, with tracks like "Living in Hell" and "Hopeless" delivered for a whole new generation of latchkey kids. Material follows 2021's 100% TOTAL PUNK EP and 2020's LP, which collected the first two cassettes-de-quarantine that began NICK VICARIO's run as Smirk. If you've worn out your copies of those releases, then Material needs no further explanation. But if you're wondering where the magic is—let's start with pure, quality songwriting. Vicario and his revolving cast of Smirk players have really done it this time. It's punk, California, paranoia, guitars, rhythm, and a sense of humor-slash-purpose joining forces to combat reality in the truest sense. Smirk have produced an impressive punk encapsulation of the times across the web of sound on Material.

Heavy Mother

This Time Around

Feel It

***"Hey kidz, this is yer Uncle Big Dad talkin’ at ya. The staff over at Feel It Records asked if I’d say something about this debut elpee from Heavy Mother. Damn! I remember rumors of a band by that name way back when I was still alive—roamin’ the Deep South and Lower Midwest. This current crop looks a little young to be the same group, if they even existed back then. But I do remember the singer Eddie Flowers when he was a shut-in Alabama weirdo writing for fanzines as a kid in the 70s. So maybe he knew the supposed original Heavy Mother? I dunno. I do know that he went on to make some records with the original proto-punk Gizmos in Bloomington, Indiana. That was like 1976/77, if I remember correctly. And then he had a psychodelik noise improv thing in L.A. called Crawlspace that went on for more decades than I survived. But these other whipper-snappers? They ain’t that old. The guitar player Mark McWhirter and bassist Zack Worcel (aka Chode) were in a long-running Bloomington R&R band called the Cowboys. They even did some stuff for Feel It Records. Mark was also in ABC Gum for a couple years there. And Chode had his own punky trio called the Chud (don’t think they were named after the classic C.H.U.D. flick). On the skins, or drums as you squares call ’em, is Mr. Clarke Joyner. He was in the original Bloomington lineup of Circuit Des Yeux (which...

Juliff, Simon

Stars

Dog Meat Records

Much-loved Melbourne rock 'n' roll label Dog Meat Records returns with first solo release from former singer/guitarist/songwriter of The Roys and God / Hoss / Powder Monkeys associate, Simon Juliff The first new Dog Meat release in over a quarter of a century is the new single “Stars”, taken from the forthcoming album of the same name, from reticent Melbourne pop-rock singer/songwriter Simon Juliff. Juliff, who was singer/guitarist/songwriter for Melbourne band The Roys in the ‘00s, was a friend of many of the ‘90s Melbourne bands on Dog Meat and nearly a Dog Meat signing with his first band The Evil Dead. Produced by long-time friend Joel Silbersher (God, Hoss, Tendrils etc) and featuring backing from members of Hoss and Kim Salmon & the Surrealists, “Stars” – both the new single and the forthcoming album - combines brightly dappled glimmers of classic pop-rock melodicism with a darkened, frazzled vibe.

Nomeansno

Dad/Revenge

Alternative Tentacles

For over thirty years, Nomeansno defined post-modern hardcore. Acclaimed by peers and adored by fans, this musically adept trio consistently thrilled sweaty crowds around the world. They were nothing less than a punk rock success story, and always on their own terms. In a word (or several), they are were at the same time intelligent, articulate, studied, thoughtful, violent, passionate, intense, playful, and they became legends. Now at long last, after twenty-two years, Alternative Tentacles Records is proud to welcome them home, starting with the brand new reissue of the Dad/Revenge 7-inch. Originally forming in 1979 by brothers Rob and John Wright after being inspired by a D.O.A. show, and guitarist Andy Kerr joining the following year, Nomeansno would go on to release eleven albums, including a collaborative album with Jello Biafra, and numerous EPs and singles. Heavily influenced by jazz and progressive rock, they created a distinct hardcore punk sound, featuring complex instrumentation, and dark, "savagely intelligent" lyrics. They are often considered foundational in the punk-jazz and post-hardcore movements, and have been cited as a formative influence on math-rock and emo. In 1985 Nomeansno entered Keye Studios to record “Sex Mad” for release on Psyche Industry Records. In 1986, the album was picked up by Alternative Tentacles Records and reissued in the United States and Europe. In order to promote that release, Alternative Tentacles released the Dad/Revenge 7-inch vinyl single in 1987. Pulling together two stand-out tracks for the release, a powerful straight up punk track “Dad”, with the...

Lady Neptune

Noz

Night School

Six face-melting gurners for the 21st Century’s, wilted and jilted generation. Glasgow’s Lady Neptune follows her New Gorbals Gabber cassette EP with her debut vinyl release NOZ. Over the course of 23 bloody fisted minutes, Lady Neptune’s—aka Moema—hyper destructed take on Gabber and Happy Hardcore breaks down the genre tropes before rebuilding them as a new pop music. If 2020’s New Gorbals Gabber showed an artist building their own language from fragments of different genres, 2022’s NOZ goes harder into the cyberpunk-ass future and takes no prisoners. Recorded and mixed at Glasgow’s legendary Green Door Studios and mastered by Rashad Becker, here Lady Neptune evolves into a monster. With the classic weapons of Dutch Gabber—distorted 909 kick drums, bursts of noise and world-eating Rave-O[1]Matic hoovering synth riffs, Lady Neptune’s 6 tracks constantly threaten to careen off the speaker into the sweatiest, most gibbering, messy corners of the club. The two years since her debut has seen Meade destroying festival dancefloors, training for the full assault that is NOZ. Live performances have seen foam guns, tequila pistols, neon stage dancers and a full, maxed-out orgy of fast-as-hell BPM, rave music burning up the cones. The experience reaps rewards from the outset on recorded form here.

Childese

Minor Eden

Not Not Fun

The music of St. Petersburg keyboard fantasist Vova Kolbin aka Childese fuses reverie and melancholy in a wobbly mirage of memory, tape hiss, field recordings, and cosmic church organ: welcome to Minor Eden. Inspired by a particularly idyllic childhood summer spent in a dilapidated country house with his fisherman father, the album feels dazed and suffused with longing and wonder, nostalgic for early mornings out on the lake, dawn light streaking the sky. Kolbin describes his process as a form of magical realism, at the threshold of new age and hypnagogia, shaping sound like a funhouse mirror. This is devotional music in its truest sense, in thrall to times enshrined and things past, to golden ages and paradises lost, the hourglass of youth forever spilling softly in a dream half-remembered.

Frunk29

The Fifth Season

Not Not Fun

Moscow multi-instrumentalist Marat Shainsky aka Frunk29’s newest opus of bedroom Balearica birthed in a room with a view: trees, rolling hills, and a mountainous, majestic landfill (“It looks like Fujiyama in winter – or how I imagine it”). Stirred by a muse he describes as “magical and foggy,” he began crafting soft-focus fusions of 4th world electronica and sunrise shoegaze with synthesizers, 5-string bass, and a thrifted Phil Pro electric guitar. The Fifth Season floats between warm and wavy, hang gliding above windswept fields and glittering harbors. It’s music of vistas both seen and felt, looming in the distance and hidden in the heart.

Tokio Ono

Individuals

Not Not Fun

Yokohama multi-instrumentalist Tokio Ono’s debut is a collection of 13 confinement compositions woven from field recordings, percussion, various keys, samples, and a sense of being far away. He characterizes it as a type of “island music” – isolated but introspective, fueled by fleeting dreams of “the space between.” Like some surrogate 4th world travel brochure, Individuals spans a 50-minute map of emerald atolls, shimmering bays, and fog-shrouded isles, equal parts dislocated and devotional. Shuffling rhythms tip-toe, shape-shift, and spiral through tropical temples and whispering villages, attuned to innerspace horizons forever unfolding and indivisible: “Differences don’t separate, but bound all things and people in one individuality.”

Fuckwolf

Goodbye, Asshole

Silver Current

Goodbye, Asshole is the first studio album by San Francisco scuzz-wave merchants Fuckwolf—its a rat’s nest of deep grooves, lost ’70s rock riff intentions and art punk damage. These conundrums of time inform Goodbye, Asshole, but they are hardly romanticized in its music. The band, Eric Park (bass, vocals), Simon Phillips (drums) and Tomo Yasuda (guitar) sound blazing and scuzzy, a tight low-fi energy blasted onto tape at renowned Bay Area indie studios summarizing the last twenty years of San Francisco’s wild artistic soul – one that is now hard to find much evidence of in the city itself, but impossible to miss in the band’s sound. Fans of OSEES, Pink Fairies, late ’70s NYC, Emotional Rescue-era Stones, trashy post-punk dub and solvent-huffing rejoice!

Glands Of External Secretion

Neck Pillow

Siltbreeze

It’s astonishing to think that the most recent vinyl full length outing from Glands of External Secretion was the splendiferous Reverse Atheism 2xLP (Butte County Free Music Society, 2011). Not that they’ve been dormant—the BuFMS CDR series and a smattering of 7-inchers and lathes have seen to that. No one’s sitting around the twiddler, waiting for their name to be called. But it must be said: the Glands’ sublime warmth and withering wit really crackle when the tone arm slips the needle down into the grooves on the olde timey record playing machine. Then, just like that, a mysterious huckster lures our heroes to Long Beach, CA in April of 2022, where, it was promised, they could record voices and set down séance tracks in the haunted rooms aboard the Queen Mary. You gotta admit, that’s a pretty good gig. But the would-be higgler’s ruse did not come to pass. The Glands were sold out for a warehouse full of Burns & Schreiber’s Pure B.S.! LPs and the duo found themselves thrust into the Siltbreeze cabal. But fate can also be serendipitous. The label, known for its propensity for bringing meat pies to a cake fight, immediately insisted these recorded tracks get the vinyl treatment. And here we fuckin’ are. If unfamiliar, Glands Of External Secretion are the duo of Barbara Manning (28th Day, World Of Pooh, SF Seals) and S. Glass (Bananafish Magazine, many things BuFMS). Since 1992, they’ve been snatching victory from the jaws of indifference with a...

Ashtray Navigations

The Apotheosis of VaVaVoom

Vhf

Third VHF dispatch from the mighty and prolific Ashtray Navigations, following 2020’s mega and extremely popular Imaginary Greatest Hits package. The curiously titled The Apotheosis of VaVaVoom is one of Phil Todd & Melanie O’Dubhshlaine’s most direct and rocking packages, with mucho ripping lead guitar action backed by some absolutely fun bubbling synth and drum grooves. “Irons Three” kicks off with wicked wah’d out leads, followed by the subdued ambience of “Tasteful Grey Putting” and “Appropros Tower” and a segue into the driving “Hinges on the Clapometer.” Side 2’s opening combo of “Slush Puppy Window” and “Avatar Down The Highway” sounds like a head on collision between Terje Rypdal and Tangerine Dream on a dark bender, with laser guitar over a bed of tumbling electronics and tiny noises. The closing “Crack Another Bloodcapsule” is one of Ashtray Nav’s all time best, like a lost krautrock classic jam with a driving rhythm from guest drummer Alex Neilson. On limited green vinyl.

Gangloff, Mike

Evening Measures

Vhf

First solo LP in a decade from long-time Pelt/Black Twigs/Eight Point Star leader, presenting a remarkable program of solo Hardanger and octave fiddle music. Evening Measures is a bold and unique statement, a direct and disarming individual expression of a musician’s inner thoughts and inspirations. Like some of Mike’s work in other projects, this ricochets back and forth across the line between the most traditional and the most “out” music, blending drone, melody, and the pure tactile sensation of acoustic string music into a personal sound. A set of all-original compositions (save the traditional “Wild Geese Chase”), Mike’s playing is languorous and expressive, with the sympathetic strings of the Hardanger-style instrument ringing out on some cuts like multiple players. The album touches on a variety of styles, keeping things fresh for the entire playing time. “The Other Side of Catawba” is a deeply psychedelic and immersive cloud of hovering string sound, reminiscent of some of Pelt’s more gentle explorations. “New River Suite” (some of which appeared in group versions by Eight Point Star on a PBS documentary about Appalachia’s New River) is a keening set of themes that have the memorable melodies of established traditional repertoire but are all completely new. “Wild Geese Chase” is a rugged and wild slash through a well-known fiddle standard. “Halfway From Shawsville” rounds things out with a lovely tribute to Mike’s Virginia town.

V/a

The Golem Rescored

Reboot

Jewish Arts & Culture Non-profit Reboot presents a vinyl record of the new rescore of the iconic 1921 silent horror film, The Golem. The Golem is the Jewish Frankenstein that inspired the Boris Karloff original and a renowned Jewish fable about the occult and Jewish identity. Featuring original music by Scott Amendola, Steven Drozd (The Flaming Lips), and Steve Berlin (Los Lobos, The Flesh Eaters) / Threshing Floor (Alan Licht, Gretchen Gonzales Davidson, Rebecca Odes, John Olson, Nate Young) / Meg Baird, Charlie Saufley and Jeremiah Lockwood / Universal Eyes (members of Slumber Party and Wolf Eyes) / Michael Morley (The Dead C) / Sharon Gal / Marika Hughes and Shahzad Ismaily / ∈Y∋ (Boredoms) .

Ervin Berlin

Junior's Got Brain Damage

Total Punk Archives

***Pressed in an ultra limited number of 200 back in 1980. ERVIN BERLIN was the work of ERVIN SHUEMAKE (a late 20s acid rocker) and two young punks named JEFF and TOM THE BOMB. Ervin had cut his teeth playing guitar on the crazy TERRY BROOKS "STRANGE"- Translucent World LP back in 1973 and spent the remainder of the 70s in various acid, hard, and prog rock bands throughout Central Florida. He met the younger punk duo of Jeff and "The Bomb" at end of 79 beginning of 80 and decided to take a stab at the punk craze with his two new acquaintances. Soon the trio was at a country and western studio in Winter Haven recording the Ervin Berlin single between sessions for possible Bellamy Brothers tracks. The blending of Ervin's acid rock chops and Jeff and Tom's thuggish punk approach resulted in this KBD space punk stomper. Equal parts Blue Cheer, Debris, Sacramento's Ozzie, and late 70s Hawkind. The 7" was pressed, a few house parties were played, and all parties went separate ways. 42 years later we are kicking off TOTAL PUNK ARCHIVES with a reissue of this lost Orlando classic. 100% TOTAL PUNK!!

Flea Collar

s/t

Feel It

***In yet another beer-fueled entry to Cleveland's storied rock'n'roll lineage, Flea Collar step up to the plate and smash home nine hits on their self-titled debut album. The Rustbelt gang of four (affectionately known as Spot, Sparky, Cookie, and Blitz) have spent the past decade'n'change honing their collective chops in groups like Bad Noids, Brown Sugar, Spike Pit, and Woodstock '99. Anywho, since their inception as Flea Collar with 2021's 'A Hole Is A Hole' on Tetryon Tapes, the gang landed at Rumpus Room Recording with Poopy Necröpondé (Sockeye) engineering their full length effort. Whether your opinion of Cleveland leans more towards r'n'r mecca or mistake on the lake, there's clearly something in the water supply and BOY, is it baked into what Flea Collar have created across these twenty-six odd minutes. Taking cues from the Non-Commercial side of CLE punk, British heavy metal, Japanese hardcore insanity, and good old fashioned Midwest rock'n'roll - Flea Collar have turned in an epic debut that lands somewhere between tongue-in-cheek & the impending dog bite illustrated on the front cover. Where this album fits into the utterly confounding cesspool of twenty-twenties culture is a coin toss, but the true heads out there may just GET IT. Flea Collar fucking rules!

Grand Invincible

The Result

Iron Lung

***Hot on the heels of 2021's excellent debut, "Demolition Strictly", Luke Sick and DJ Eons packed a brand new bowl of drowsed out West Bay hip-hop. This time around though they decided to do it the OG way by making all the beats with a PT01 plugged directly into a SP-404 (all beats sequenced in the SP-404 too). Damn! and guess what? *ahem*, the result blows all expectations straight out the tunnel. GI is unstoppable. Limited to 200 pro-printed red shelled cassettes housed in a J-card sleeve inside a clear Norelco box. Recorded and mixed at The Invincible Lab and The Rooftops of Monte Vista by DJ Eons One. Mastered by Dan Randall. Art by Luke Sick, Dan Lactose and L-Wood Media. Dedicated to all the fallen B-boys, DJs, MCs and Graffiti Writers of the West Bay.

Lykotonon

Promethean Pathology

Profound Lore

Lykotonon’s Promethean Pathology is a digitized descent into the darker side of the human psyche. It is the probing question that hangs over all of humanity in the quietest of moments. Avant-garde, industrial / electronic black metal featuring members of Wayfarer, Stormkeep, and Blood Incantation.

Alien Nosejob

Stained Glass

Total Punk

Much loved, relentless rocker, Jake Robertson is back yet again with the next instalment of his ridiculously productive solo project, Alien Nosejob. Jake’s got a brand-new bag of tricks and I ain’t gonna beat around the bush; it sounds like AC/DC! Stained Glass may be his finest and most stylistically suited work to date. Ironically, and to quote his own sarcastic lyrics from the album’s second track, he definitely fits this shoe. Not only does Jake have the high-pitched pipes while many others don’t (obviously a vital part in this sound), but the guitar chops to pull off the sweet, sustained lead breaks of this particular style. And he does so in great fashion as you’ll be made immediately aware from the scorching solo on album opener, “Beatles vs, Stones”. Trust Jake to write a song with that title! But alas! it’s not all Bon Scott’s and Angus Young’s. Some Rikk Agnew guitar lines shine through on album closer, "Mouldy Dough". "Shuffle Boogie" marks Jake’s first ever stab at the shuffle backbeat - which he says is him knicking from Rose Tattoo what they knicked from AC/DC - but it also kinda sounds like a sped up Jean Genie or some lost Bowie boog. "RNR Rubbish Bin" stomps its way through five minutes of electrified solo’s and witty lyrics. Even Brian Johnston makes an appearance on the Ausmuteants sequel, “Coastal Living 2”; about growing up on the NSW Central Coast. The bulk (backing tracks) of Stained Glass were recorded by...

Montgomery, Roy

Camera Melancholia

Grapefruit

Camera Melancholia is a double album of instrumental music inspired by and dedicated to Kerry McCarthy (1967-2021) who was Montgomery's partner for twenty years and the mother of two children they had together. She died from cancer in early 2021 after first being diagnosed in 2014. McCarthy was a professional curator in the area of pictorial collections, particularly around photographic material, and her PhD used the work of Roland Barthes to theorize about the legacies of images associated with Antarctic exploration in the early 20th Century. The cover art for Camera Melancholia was provided by Ronnie van Hout, an Aotearoa New Zealand artist associated with the earliest graphic design work for Flying Nun Records. Van Hout was also a very close and long standing friend of McCarthy. The gatefold album includes the text for ten poems written for and about McCarthy.

New Buck Biloxi

Cellular Automaton

Total Punk

The sound of the future is here! Robert Craig is back on the scene. More agile, wits sharpened, and glasses more expensive. Genius turned urban guerrilla! The band is new and so is the name. Total Punk is proud to bring you, NEW BUCK BILOXI, the latest outing from the man who knows everything. The perfect soundtrack for high kicking cops, leg sweeping meter maids, or blowing up government officials.

Portron Portron Lopez

Ice Cream Soufi

PL Records

Coming on like a mutation of all the wild and tempered instrumentation of the Dirty Three in full flow, the ambling and meandering yet intense desert rock of Scenic via a long and delightful trawl around the mountain tops of the Mediterranean coastline—evocative and exhilarating music that pulls you along for the ride!! Although an instrumental record, this album is as joyous as some of the most rambunctious and rowdy pop albums you’re ever likely to hear. Portron Portron Lopez don’t do concepts. There are no great discussions about where they should pull their influences from, or pre-planning about how to structure studio work. The Parisian-formed trio exist in spontaneity, a creative co-habitancy that relies on feel and groove—as evidenced on their three studio albums to-date. Exploratory odysseys that bely the potential pitfalls an improvisational-minded group might fall into during the recording process, they’ve moved between shades of psychedelia and Middle Eastern-inflected drones as well as more electronic and club-based touchstones, doing so in a way that feels effortlessly free. That sense of adventure is furthered still on forthcoming album Ice Cream Soufi.

Junk DNA

Kopk Kopa

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Junk DNA is the newly christened project from Brian Pyle, a man of many ongoing pursuits including Ensemble Economique, The Starving Weirdos, and RV Paintings. Born and raised in wilds of California, Pyle has recently been splitting his time in Vilnius, Lithuania, with his Junk DNA debut Kopk Kopa contemplating his time and place within Lithuania. It is true that much of Pyle’s works is reflective about the human condition responding to a particular environment. The slow burn of Humboldt fog, in particular, weighs heavy on much of the atmospheric compositions in his previous works, with his impassioned noir electronics deftly navigating references to giallo film scores, the classic 4AD ethos, shoegazing drift, and even overt nods to Spandau Ballet and The Sisters Of Mercy. Kopk Kopa translates from Lithuanian as a directive to “climb the dune,” and come from one who has resided on the dunes of Manilla Beach in Humboldt County, California, it is an apt metaphor as almost a Tarkovskian pursuit of a beleaguered existential goal. As Junk DNA, Pyle conjures a radiantly dark hypnosis of eerie tones that rasp, buzz, and shimmer within vertiginous orbits and arching crescendos. Obscured instrumentation and rupturing samples dilate and stretch towards an unattainable event horizon beyond the waters, beyond the sun, beyond the stars. Klaus Schulze seems an distant reference, especially the Wagnerian overtures within Cyborg, though Pyle has always followed his own courses of action. Cinematic in scope and bleeding with a somber, yet vaguely hopeful moodiness, Kopk...

Eteraz

Villain

Iron Lung

***Beyond the clearly scorching and well executed Disbones/crasher/d-beat/crust whatever you wanna call it bombastic hardcore that ETERAZ has crafted on Villain, what strikes this listener most is that the whole thing is belted out in Persian. And it sounds fucking perfect. The harsh throat scraping sounds of the language add an extra layer of immediacy and power to an already flawless Discharge style delivery. Add that to a wall of tasteful distortion, acidic riffage and a drum battery that would detonate any unexploded ordinance within a 10 mile radius and you're starting to get the picture. 350 on black 140gr vinyl housed in a 24pt reverse board jacket with printed inner sleeve, foldout poster and download card.

Lexicon

Devoid Of Light

Iron Lung

***Following up a demo as raging as LEXICON's was is a tough thing to do for most but holy shit Devoid Of Light powerstomps that thing to radioactive dust! KJ's deathly anger/despair ridden vocals are some of the most intense in modern history. The USHC infused noise-crust riffs fit perfectly into a tensely driven percussion grenade of anxious drums and bleary, life-questioning rage. Do we need to say "explosive"? Because that is exactly what the hell it is. Get fucked up, turn the fuzz to 11 and get as strong as humanly possible. Life can be a real piece of shit sometimes, let this be the soundtrack when it is. 400 copies on black 140gr vinyl housed in a 24pt reverse board jacket with lyric insert, giant poster and download card included. Recorded by JOSE "PHASMA MORTEM" MORA. Mixed and mastered by WILL KILLINGSWORTH. Art by DEVIN MCKERNAN.

Lunadon, Dion

Beyond Everything

In The Red

After releasing his self-titled debut album in 2017, Dion Lunadon (The D4, ex-A Place To Bury Strangers) and In The Red Records is proud to release his sophomore album, Beyond Everything. Beyond Everything will be Lunadon’s first release on In The Red (an ideal match for his music), as well as his first full-length since departing A Place To Bury Strangers. Written, performed and recorded by himself, the songs tap into a raw, palpable energy that blur the line between the music and the person. Drums on the record were played by Blaze Bateh (Bambara) and Nick Ferrante (The Black Hollies). Lunadon says; “The record was written and recorded sporadically between 2017 and 2019. I probably wrote about one hundred songs during this period. The first album was pretty relentless which I liked, but I wanted to make something more dynamic for the second record. Something that could be more conducive to repeated listens. I’d get in my studio, come up with a song title, and start working on any ideas that I had. For example, with ‘Elastic Diagnostic,’ the idea was to create a hum that evokes the sound of life coursing through your body. Everything else kind of formed around that idea.” “An arresting, noise-infected dose of psych-garage.” on “It’s The Truth”—Brooklyn Vegan “An amped up garage psych ripper.” on “Living And Dying With You”—Brooklyn Vegan “A ferocious rocker.” on “Living And Dying With You”—Destroy Exist “A gritty and raw glam-like anthem centered around chugging power chords, Lunadon’s...

Dumb

Pray 4 Tomorrow

Mint

DUMB had a classic start as a DIY outfit back in 2015, playing their first shows in the dining room of a tear-down in east Vancouver. The four band members, Franco Rossino, Shelby Vredik, Pipe Morelli, and Nick Short, were all part of a larger group of friends that jammed and partied together often. Seven years later, the band is set to release their third LP with Mint Records, Pray 4 Tomorrow—self-recorded at Choms, a studio co-owned by Nick Short and Franco Rossino. DUMB has toured extensively in North America and Europe, played with Wolf Parade and Dilly Dally, and are known for their catchy punk rhythms, squealing guitar feedback, and strongly spoken lyrics. Over the years DUMB’s songwriting has developed, and on Pray 4 Tomorrow their pop sensibilities manage to shine through the dissonant tones and syncopated rhythms borrowed from Yo La Tengo and Devo. Consider “Excuse me”, which finds a Beach Boys-esque melody placed gently atop the drop-tuned dissonance of Rossino and Short’s duelling guitars, or “Gibberish”—a heavy hitting post-punk bop that culminates in a melodic instrumental piano outro. DUMB is doing their best to balance their noisier tendencies with pretty melodies, in an approach similar to San Francisco’s Pardoner. Rossino’s vocals have matured from abstract rambling towards nuanced commentary, often poking fun at his own self-righteous attitude towards the stress of living in the information age. In “Out of Touch”, Rossino yells “I can see you talking but it sounds like simulations, I’m not sure...

Dream Unending

Song Of Salvation

20 Buck Spin

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received an 8.5 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork. ON LIMITED AQUA BLUE / OXBLOOD MERGE VINYL!!! The 2021 Dream Unending debut album Tide Turns Eternal was a marked shift in musical ambition for Derrick Vella (Tomb Mold) and Justin DeTore (Innumerable Forms, Sumerlands). While structured with a foot firmly in death / doom, a far loftier purpose and progressivism was its hallmark, as such distancing itself from others pursuing the style. Now returning only a year later with the stunning Song Of Salvation, that exploratory zeal is given substantially greater allowance to soar and shine. The fourteen minute title-track opener enters like a morning sunrise over a calm sea before ramping up into ethereal heaviness like the richly textured waves of a sudden ocean storm. The songs momentum never retreats into laborious repetition, always opening new doorways, ebbing and flowing like river water from its source. Like solitarily gazing at the downtown lights of the city at night from the window of a darkened room, “Secret Grief” features the guest talents of vocalist Phil Swanson and Leila Abdul-Rauf on trumpet. The tranquil interlude of “Murmur Of Voices” gives way to the evocative “Unrequited” that begins with a lonely solo guitar before transitioning into a drifting daze of afternoon reverie and subconscious meditation. Finally comes the album’s epic bookend, sixteen minute closer “Ecstatic Reign.” It features perhaps the album’s heaviest straight doom moments along with the return of Tide Turns Eternal featured guest voices McKenna Rae...

Heaven For Real

Energy Bar

Mint

"My life: a slow clap progression, pace rising; to celebrate in the smallest finding - feels right to show admiration that grows," Mark Grundy begins on “Slow Clap”, the first track from Heaven For Real’s sophomore full-length Energy Bar. Formed in 2012, and consisting of songwriter twins Mark and J. Scott Grundy (Quaker Parents) and their frequent collaborators, drummer Nathan Doucet and synth player/percussionist Cher Hann, the Toronto by way of Halifax project has been taking time to shape the follow-up to their 2016 Mint debut, Kill Your Memory. Springboarding from their early 2022 EP, Sweet Rose Green Winter Desk Top Tell This Side Autumn Of The Fighter Hot In A Cool Way, they describe the project as a “living collaboration”, one that strives to compress life’s truths into a distorted reflection of all of its facets. It’s this that drives Energy Bar – a hyper, trash-compacted mosaic of the band ten years that’s simultaneously dreamlike and alive. Recording the album with Jonas Bonnetta at Port William Sound, H4R aimed to cultivate an electrically charged live energy, which they fuse with rich and playful compositions. Tracks like “Lately” and “Energy Bar” are defined by tireless, wired drums, around which are woven buoyant guitar lines, sounding at times like the weirder shades of bands like Meat Puppets, Prefab Sprout and even early Cate Le Bon. Included too are hints of The Feelies, Mdou Moctar, Built To Spill and Cast; Heaven For Real’s approach is an experimental one, yet one unafraid to...

Drowse

Wane Into It

Flenser

In 2019, Drowse’s Kyle Bates set out to produce a self-recorded new album. Marked by moving across state lines, long-distance relationships, and deaths in the family, the following years proved to be metamorphic. Now, three years later, he’s emerged with Wane Into It, continuing a distinctly Pacific Northwestern tradition of self-recording indie experimentalists (Grouper, The Microphones, Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You). One of the most impactful moments came during the looming passing of a family member. With death expected, the choice was made to conduct a bizarre “living-wake” gathering—with the soon-to-be-deceased in attendance. Shortly after, Bates found himself disturbed, preoccupied with the abstraction of memory. The experience led him to reassess the tool one uses to curate our selective memories: the internet. The internet, which creeped into even more aspects of life during the pandemic, serves as our self-made digital link to the past. Its uncaring presence layered over humbling thoughts of death and his own childhood memories of the Oregon Coast as he worked on Wane Into It; life’s hyperreal texture sank into the recordings as he felt his body age and wane. Big sounds were captured in bedrooms, hallways, practice spaces, forests, and on highways throughout West Coast—vibraphones chime over black metal guitars, a mellotron drones under degraded samples, violins splinter against granular field recordings. In the process of documenting these aural moments Bates completed an MFA at Mills College, coloring the album with shades of avant-electronic and minimalist composition (Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Sarah Davachi...

Delivery

Forever Giving Handshakes

Feel It

Both broadening and defying the sounds of their first two 7” releases, Delivery continue their claim for the title of hardest and fastest working band in town on their debut full length LP ‘Forever Giving Handshakes’. Collecting songs written over the Melbourne five-piece’s two year lifespan and following on from the band’s bedroom project origins of ‘Yes We Do’ and the expanded one-two punch of ‘Personal Effects/The Topic’, ‘Forever Giving Handshakes’ captures Delivery at full force for the first time, leaning into the fully-realised live sound they’ve been quite actively working on since their first show in March 2021. Here the band collate a 12-track garage-punk opus, their five distinct voices simultaneously pulling songs in different directions while an undeniable chemistry reveals a combined hive mind ascending on a clear group mission… to rock. If you didn’t have the Delivery phenomenon yet, you’re about to. Marking the beginning of a victory lap for Delivery, the album rounds out a sprint of unrelenting live shows, impressive support slots and two stellar 7”s, all within a tidy 18 months. ‘Forever Giving Handshakes’ is a statement from Delivery and one of the strongest Australian punk debut albums of the past decade. (STREET DATE - 11/11/2022)

Strychnos

A Mother's Curse

Dark Descent

Danish extreme metal veterans Strychnos reveal their long-awaited debut A Mother’s Curse on Colorado Springs’ Dark Descent Records... Formed in 1997 by Martin Leth Andersen (also of Undergang fame), Strychnos might just be the Danish underground’s best kept secret. A Mother’s Curse is the product of a craft perfected over twenty-five years of toil, a true celebration of extreme metal mastery that surpasses all genre limitations. “We are proud to finally present eight tracks of pitch-black death metal tragedy as it was always intended to be: dark, atmospheric, brutal, and tragic!” exclaims Andersen. The intricately sculpted compositions shift seamlessly between moods of terror, hope, and tragedy, building a momentous atmosphere rarely achieved in this day and age. Add to this the inventive riffing and bone-shattering vocals of the highest order and the result is A Mother’s Curse. The truly complete work is wrapped in stunning cover by the inimitable Daniel Corcuera: “The chilling motif is based on Danish sculptor Niels Hansen Jacobsen’s statue Death And The Mother from 1892, depicting a young woman in the moment of ultimate tragedy. Jacobsen was inspired by the ending of The Tale Of A Mother, a story written in 1847 by famous author Hans Christian Andersen: ‘And Death walked with her child into the unknown land.’ ”

Dawn Riding

You're Still Here

Speakeasy Studios SF

In San Francisco’s Mission District, there’s a Victorian house with a garden full of towering tobacco flowers and rose vines so thick they’re pulling down the fence. Every Sunday, for a great span of 2021, songwriter Sarah Rose Janko would join producer and engineer Alicia Vanden Heuvel (Aislers Set, Magic Trick) there, to play guitar, sing harmonies, and hum lines for other instruments, before retreating to Vanden Heuvel’s basement recording studio (Speakeasy Studios SF), to roll tape on her Otari half-inch 8-track. This is how, week by week, Dawn Riding’s new record You’re Still Here, was chipped out of the ethereal and into an expansive album of meticulously crafted and deeply captivating songs. It’s an album steeped in intimacy and warmth, each song built with a level of restraint that leaves room for Jankos’s quietly fierce vocals and her powerful songwriting to sit front and center. Nothing is rushed and each song is presented almost as a vignette: some with so much stillness one can feel the relationships, some that build from the heart’s interior solitude into swells of emotional catharsis. Above all, the album drives and breathes with storytelling. You’re Still Here marks Dawn Riding’s third full-length album, dropping this November as a co-release between The Long Road Society and Speakeasy Studios SF, two women-owned Bay Area record labels, a fitting arrangement considering that the album’s creation was deeply collaborative. The credits reveal a wealth of Bay Area musicians lending their talents, with multi-instrumentalist Vanden Heuvel acting as producer...

Curleys

s/t 12"

Total Punk

Curleys are not a hardcore band and they’ve asked that you stop sending them fan mail telling them which obscure early '80s hardcore band they remind you of. They are not impressed by your knowledge, have no idea who or what you are talking about, and find both you and your opinion just about as boring as most live bands they see. Curleys are Curley and play Curley songs about Curley things and this is their debut LP. 11 songs clocking in at just over 14 minutes about their dogs, liking what the like, chugging roaches and more. Razor sharp, lightning fast, and 100% TOTAL PUNK!!!

Trost, Heather

Desert Flowers

Ba Da Bing!

As Heather Trost put together her new album Desert Flowers, she imagined herself sitting out on the mesa amidst the arid climate and sand. Even with such little water to survive, wildflowers bloom. This vision is an embellishment of Trost’s Albuquerque surroundings, an intersection of rural splendor and emptiness. She remains focused on those purple, yellow and orange flowers with faces beaming up to the sky, thriving on very little. “How does a flower grow in the desert?” she sings. Desert Flowers postulates the potential for new life. Using the messages from the unconscious during sleep, the record ultimately conceives a bridge to the world beyond one’s own. Written and recorded in her home studio, Trost began with harmonic frameworks, allowing the melodies to naturally take root. Introductory track “Frog And Toad Are Friends”—yes, named after the book—is like a surf song from a sci-fi movie. Trost sees it as a mindwipe, “a playful kind of romp to help shake off the cobwebs and get the bones moving.” The album ripens as it progresses, and “Sandcastles” best embodies the spirit of the record. Lush strings and bass are complimented by a slow guitar groove, as Trost soulfully fantasizes about Earth’s regeneration. “In time, the bullets and tanks, and all of humanity’s violent creations will melt back into mountains and the ocean,” she says. Integral to the record’s creation was Trost’s cohort in A Hawk & A Hacksaw and record label Living Music Duplication, Jeremy Barnes. “This album wouldn’t sound the...

Laurel Canyon

Drop Out

Nuclear Banana

Punk rock band Laurel Canyon – Nicholas Gillespie, Serg Cereja, and Dylan Loccarini – formed in 2019 when Nick and Serg met through a mutual friend in their hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania. After connecting over a shared interest in both Arthur Rimbaud and The Stooges, the two began to rehearse together in Serg’s garage. By October 2020, Serg and Nick began composing original songs together as Laurel Canyon, the first of which, “Two Times Emptiness,” was released on May 1, 2021. Following the release of “Two Times Emptiness” b/w “Enemy Lines,” Nick and Serg traded in their characteristic jangle for fuzz pedals and established a relationship with veteran producer Bryce Goggin (Pavement, The Lemonheads) at Trout Recording in Brooklyn. Between July and November of 2021 the group recorded a 5-track EP “Victim,” released on January 14, 2022, rounding out the line-up with bassist Dylan Loccarini. The artist Savage Pencil, who has created artwork for Big Black and Sonic Youth, drew the EP cover. Singles “Daddy’s Honey” and “Eczema” created a buzz online and were featured in Spotify playlists “All New Rock” and “Smells Like Stream Spirit.” Since the release of their debut EP, Laurel Canyon have recorded with Steve Albini and opened for Agent Orange at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. The Steve Albini produced tracks make up their next release “Drop Out” b/w “Tangiers,” which will be released on 7” vinyl this Halloween. The cover artwork for “Drop Out” was once again provided by Savage Pencil....

Black Sabbath Cover Band Rehearsal

(Vol. 2) Master of Rehearsal

Famous Class

***BSCBR is a group of Black Sabbath lovers hailing from New York City. The group consists of Brad Truax (Interpol), Mick Barr (Ocrilim, Krallice), Greg Fox (Liturgy, Ex Eye), Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and Angel Deradoorian (Dirty Projectors, Deradoorian). After a music residency in Berlin where Zinner, Deradoorian, and Fox met up, the first formation of the band was created. Zinner had the idea of bringing the music to NYC (when Truax and Barr joined) where the band received immediate attention and sold out their first concert. It was surprising for everyone, but they just kept on playing, and the people kept on showing up. It's been one of their favorite bands to play in ever. The love of Sabbath has brought so much joy to this group and there's no greater feeling than spreading that joy to fellow fans. (STREET DATE - 10/28/2022)

Martha

Please Don’t Take Me Back

Dirtnap

Durham indiepop-punks Martha return with their fourth album, and it might just be their best one yet. With their endlessly radiant hooks dialed up to the maximum setting, paired with another heart-rending and relatable lyric sheet that reflects on the universal scars of the pandemic years, Please Don’t Take Me Back is the work of a band in the form of their life. It’s also an instant classic—one that’s both smartly prescient and warmly addictive. Recorded at Nottingham’s JT Soar by “Bad” Phil Booth (The Cool Greenhouse, Rattle, Grey Hairs), Please Don’t Take Me Back is a timely collection of deliciously catchy pop songs about “resisting the feeling that the good days are behind us.” Two things set these songs apart: firstly, the sense of resolution the band provide by working through these fears to find what positivity they can—making this the go-to record for any ongoing existential crisis in 2022. Secondly, there’s the effortless brilliance which ensures every melody cements itself to the memory from the very first listen to the album closer. One will hear echoes of The Housemartins, The Weakerthans, Cheap Trick and Heavenly in their sound, but ultimately it sounds like Martha found a way to turn their strongest features all the way to eleven. What better way to process the aftermath of the past two years?

Class

Epoca de Los Vaqueros

Feel It

***"Class of Tucson AZ—instantly familiar, idiosyncratic to the max, a glorious collision in which several of American punk’s leading lights emerge from their vehicles unscathed (though I make no promises for the rest of you, see below). What more can I say about 2022’s most eagerly anticipated full-length album? (a bit more as it turns out, which is fortunate as my fee is pretty expensive, onerous, even) These songs have the requisite crunch / glue ratio and more than anyone else in their idiom, remind me of moments that don’t happen nearly enough, in rock, in life, when your eyes are closed, anywhere. I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to presume the persons responsible for these gems are keen students of the last 40+ years of underground/overground sounds (the good shit anyway), but there’s a singular voice, a defined worldview if you will, somehow cutting through our bland, brutal, grim as fuck moment in history. If you think I’m building Class up a bit much, I can promise you this—there’s at least a half dozen people I know who will hear this record and immediately fall into the throes of a deep depression because they’re _not in this band_ . And if you’re wary of being hyped-2-death, spare a thought for me for just a minute. I’m the one who’s gonna have to talk them off a ledge (figuratively, it’s mostly single stories in this part of the country)."—Gerard Cosloy

Blacklist

Afterworld

Profound Lore

Blacklist is an atmospheric modern rock band whose music has been described as “anthemic” (The Guardian), “darkly erotic, strangely sensual” (The Village Voice) and “a much-needed anomaly in NYC’s music scene” (Other Music NYC). Starting out as the flagship band of artist Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd Records imprint, their trademark sound is dense and dark, incorporating elements of shoegaze and heavy metal with coldwave. The members often cite influences like My Bloody Valentine and Motörhead alongside bands like Comsat Angels, Killing Joke, and The Sound, while singer Joshua Strachan’s (Vaura) lyrics split the difference between the anthemic manifestos of Manic Street Preachers and Sisters of Mercy’s Vision Thing. Blacklist’s debut album, Midnight Of The Century—produced by Ed Buller (Suede, Pulp)—was released in 2009. The album’s main focus was a rejection of what Strachan described as a fear of looming new forms of fascism aided by the rise of various political and religious dogmas. After a long hiatus, the band returned in summer of 2020 with the “Disorder” single, inspired by the racial justice protests in the United States, and the b-Side “No Secret Islands,” which takes aim at the dystopian fantasies of tech billionaires. In April of 2022 “The Final Resistance” was announced as the lead single from their upcoming album Afterworld, due to be released in late autumn via Profound Lore Records. Post-punk.com called it a “captivating and dense explosion of coldwave and unfettered emotion,” and Brooklyn Vegan said it “picks up where the band left off with widescreen scope...

Nadja

Labyrinthine

Broken Spine

Nadja’s latest full-length offering Labyrinthine, recorded during the pandemic and concurrently with their Southern Lord album Luminous Rot, finally sees a CD release on the band’s own label, Broken Spine. Labyrinthine explores themes of identity and loss, monstrosity and regret, extreme asceticism, the differences between labyrinths and mazes, taking inspiration from Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Tombs Of Atuan, and Victor Pelevin’s reinterpretation of the story of the minotaur and Ariadne, The Helmet Of Horror. While this might be Nadja’s heaviest, doomiest album to date, it is unique in the band’s extensive catalogue as each track features a guest vocalist: Alan Dubin, legendary American vocalist from O.L.D., Khanate currently Gnaw; Rachel Davies, vocalist and bassist from the British band, Esben & The Witch; Lane Shi Otayanii, a Chinese multi-media artist and vocalist in Elizabeth Colour Wheel; and Dylan Walker, American vocalist from grindcore / noise band Full Of Hell. Nadja has released numerous albums on many different underground labels—Alien8 Recordings, Daymare Records, Robotic Empire, Hydrahead Records, Gizeh Records, and Important Records, to name a few. The duo has toured extensively around the world, including performances at such festivals as SXSW, FIMAV, Roadburn, Donaufest, Le Guess Who, Incubate, and Unsound, and has shared the stage with such artists as Earth, OM, Khanate, Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, and Godflesh.