Ace Of Spit

***"I first heard about St. Louis garage rockers Ace of Spit in 2022 thanks to their Sophomore Lounge-released self-titled debut album, a wild punk rock LP that sucked up and spat out surf rock, proto-punk, and even a bit of power pop on us all (it snuck onto my year-end list and everything). Four years later, Ace of Spit kicked off 2026 by releasing their sophomore album Ace of Spit II, this time co-released by legendary St. Louis music venue The Sinkhole’s record label and something called “Wombat Cock”. If anything, Ace of Spit II is an even greater commitment to the twin tornados of freewheeling garage punk and “spaghetti western” vibes; with one major exception, the quartet (Brett, Scott, Steve, and Gabe) spend all of this LP’s twenty-seven minutes prowling the fabled “Cramps to MC5” spectrum. The album’s first three songs are all “rippers”, to be sure, but the ever-so-subtle desert-rockabilly sound is already there, and it only gets more obvious in “Diaspora Rock”, “Road to Reno”, and the genuinely-Western-evoking “Past Continuous”. That one “major exception” I mentioned earlier is “Parts List”, a bizarre excursion into fuzzed-out, fried electronica (with Link Wray riffs over top of it, of course) for three minutes; no idea why that’s smack dab in the middle of the record, but I don’t mind it–and besides, everything else rocks, so who cares?"—Rosy Overdrive