Goner   Page 1

Split System

Vol. 2

Goner

Naarm / Melbourne, Australia has been churning out reliable punk rock since the likes of The Chosen Few and Rowland S. Howard were kicking about in the late ’70s. Split System are a band that carry on this tradition into the 21st century. Cooked up behind the scenes in the COVID lockdowns, they seemingly came out of nowhere but sounded like they’d been slamming beers to Saints and Radio Birdman records together and playing gigs for many years. Their Vol. 2 is unmistakable Aussie high voltage proto-punk. In their short time on the scene they have demonstrated a knack for combining muscular street punk with classic rock hooks. Their debut album Vol. 1 and follow up 7-inch were described as ferocious and powerful records with amphetamine swagger. They’re high energy and don’t believe in muddy guitar tones. The band are in their element during their raw live shows. They have shared bills with the likes of Amyl & The Sniffers, Cosmic Psychos, Civic, Bad//Dreems, Hard-Ons, CLAMM, Cable Ties & C.O.F.F.I.N.

King Louie Bankston

Harahan Fats

Goner

Goner Records is honored to release Harahan Fats, an extraordinary posthumous album by King Louie Bankston (December 18, 1972 - February 12, 2022). The collection showcases an American artist at the pinnacle of his musical and personal identity. An aural roadmap to South Louisiana that’s imbued with personal mythologies and blurry, beer-soaked and drug-skewed memories, Harahan Fats was recorded over a four-year period that culminated in mid-October 2021. As co-founder and drummer of the Royal Pendletons, Bankston recorded with power-pop legend Alex Chilton. He picked up a Gibson Flying V for his work in Bad Times, a garage rock supergroup that Bankston helmed alongside Eric Oblivian and Jay Reatard. In the 1990s, Bankston channeled his energy into bands like the Persuaders, Intelligenitals, the Clickems, Harahan Crack Combo, and Gerry And The Bastard Makers. At the dawn of the new century, he founded the legendary King Louie One Man Band. In 2000, Louie pulled up stakes in New Orleans and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he joined the power-pop punk band The Exploding Hearts. Bankston wrote many of the songs and played keyboards on their only album, the highly acclaimed Guitar Romantic, released mere weeks before three members of the band were killed in a van wreck, and recently reissued by Third Man Records. Bankston then landed in Memphis, where he formed the Loose Diamonds, a ramshackle bar band, with Jack Oblivian, Harlan T. Bobo, and Gary Wrong. With guitarist Julian Fried, he formed Missing Monuments and Black Rose Band,...

Bloodshot Bill

Psyche-o-Billy

Goner

From his first self-released album in 2001, through sixteen more, over thirty singles, and collaborations with the likes of King Khan, Mark Sultan, Jon Spencer, Deke Dickerson, and the 5.6.7.8’s, Bloodshot Bill has parlayed his unique blend of rockabilly, R&B, and garage rock into feverishly prolific productions that tap into the very roots of mutant rock’n’roll. As his reputation has grown, Bloodshot Bill has been deemed a rockabilly wildman, a primitive, a seminal punk, a throwback to the wild ’50s, and the deranged spirit of psychobilly madness. His latest album, Psyche-o-Billy, on Goner Records, exudes raw energy and authenticity via a frenzied, stripped down soundscape that defies all rules and descriptions. Written during the COVID-19 pandemic and recorded at Bloodshot Bill’s home studio in Montréal, Québec, Psyche-o-Billy is equal parts joyous, moody, plaintive, searching, and deeply steeped in that old weird America documented via the otherworldly tunes captured on Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music. “My music is for weirdos,” Bloodshot Bill confirms. “I want ‘em to feel good...or bad… Whatever way they wanna feel!” “Like Roy Orbison with a head injury!” —John Waters

Bennett

Hang Around

Goner

Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and DIY home-recorder Bennett Foster (Barbaras, Magic Kids) helped put the pop song on the garage punk menu ten years ago. Now they are back. "Hang Around" is their second single.

Alien Nosejob

The Derivative Sounds Of

Goner

Less than twelve months on from the triumphant rock ’n’ roll record that was Stained Glass, Australia’s most tasteful sonic culinary artiste Jake Robertson serves up The Derivative Sounds Of, another platter in his never-ending, ever-extending Alien Nosejob banquet. Since initially firing out similar flavors on his first offering, Alien Nosejob has conquered the challenges of disco, hardcore, new wave, rock and roll (all drowned in his characteristically sweet sense of humor) before finally returning back to his musical roots: the jangly, adolescent feel of 1960s garage. After one of Robertson’s first bands, The Frowning Clouds, reunited for a few shows in September 2022, he found himself digging up old songs and riffs from the period, some spanning back to as early as 2006 and up until around 2012. This record features many of those song ideas—some reworked, some rewritten, some exactly the same. All together now as one hot package. Leaning into his musical tastes from the Clouds’ period of existence, Robertson digs up inspiration in some teenage staples: The Troggs, Mike Furber, the under-appreciated bands that make up the Shutdown ’66 / Back From The Grave compilations, without overdoing the sugar, salt, MSG, whatever one wants to call it. This record was recorded by Robertson all by his lonesome over a weekend in his garage. There’s no paisley shirts, no skinny-ties, no winkle-pickers, no slim-fit suits and no haircuts—just Robertson and his 1964 MacBook Pro. Garage rock revival is a sound that’s often overdone,...

The Exbats

Song Machine

Goner

In a just world, Song Machine, the fifth full-length album from The Exbats, which arrives via Goner Records, would become one of the most-loved and most-listened to albums of the 2020s. With the thirteen-track album, the Bisbee, Arizona-based band further their analog back-to-the-future combination of the Shangri-Las and pre-Velvet Underground doo-wop wannabe Lou Reed, churning out catchy tunes laden with buoyant choruses that rank alongside the best A-sides recorded in the shadow of the Brill Building or with the Wrecking Crew in tow. The Exbats are effortless time travelers—this time, they’ve set the dial for the early 1970s, incorporating the sonic magic of The Partridge Family, Muswell Hillbillies-era Kinks, and Brian Wilson into the crux of their musical ethos, evident on tracks like the propulsive “Riding With Paul” and “The Happy Castaway,” which bookend the album. “What I remember about that era is going to record stores and seeing a wall of 45s that somebody was tasked with moving around [in concordance with] the Billboard charts,” says Kenny McLain, who, alongside daughter Inez, is the driving force behind The Exbats. “With our band we’re kinda moving things around on that towering wall of singles, as if it were from some sort of ancient tomb, and we’re trying to crack a code and make it to number one. So, I suppose, some magic door will open. And we’ll all be free? Or something like that.” Inez McLain, namesake of the Monkees’ wool-capped guitarist Mike Nesmith, has played drums and sung for...

C.O.F.F.I.N

Australia Stops

Goner

Australia Stops was recorded in January 2023 at The Pet Food Factory studio with producer Jason Whalley (Frenzal Rhomb) behind the desk. A record that showcases a collection of diverse and gripping new works that highlight the band’s evolution into more melodious, 1970s Australiana and boogie rock and roll. Frenzied, high-voltage guitars, thumping rhythms, flowing melody and clever, captivating lyrics exhibit an undeniable progression in composition and songwriting, while still unmistakably the C.O.F.F.I.N that fans worldwide have come to worship. For those who are no strangers to the Australian highways, Australia Stops may be best recognized as words donned on the back of truck mudflaps. To C.O.F.F.I.N, Australia Stops are words that became a polysemous idea and observation on Australian society, culture, art, politics and progression. “When the city burns up you get out, when the flint hits shot you get down,” lyrics roared by Ben Portnoy, a look into “idle-Australia,” the government action (or lack thereof) to social issues and the overarching notion of fear of change in this country. While the theme Australia Stops poses political questions and ideals, it also synchronously shines light on the eminence of community, the healthy beating heart of art and music, the beautiful landscapes and divergent nature surroundings held dear within Australia. With this, Australia Stops is neither a fully positive or negative elucidation of the country. It is a celebration of the things the citizens are lucky to have, while always trying to encourage and inspire those around them...

Bennett

Glass Ball

Goner

Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and DIY home-recorder Bennett Foster helped put the pop song on the garage punk menu circa turn-of-the-10s, most notably as a principal member of Memphis bands The Barbaras and Magic Kids. After a half decade hiatus from writing and performing, Bennett returned to their bedroom studio, where they have spent the last few years producing a growing songbook. "Glass Ball" is their solo debut.

Dippers

Clastic Rock

Goner

Whether it was fear of the trademark bogeyman emerging from small-hours infomercial hell or it was just time for a change, but the artist(s) formally known as Thigh Master is now Dippers. As they put singles and an album or two behind them, most guitar pop groups tend to shed any rough edges, exuberance, energy, propulsion and other associated special elements in the name of “maturity,” “increased focus on songwriting,” and other concerns that basically translate to a prolonged yawn. Thigh Master was always a strident, more rambunctious proposition, and this is carried over 150% to Dippers. For the first album under said moniker, (Thigh Master) founder and leader Matthew Ford (vocals, guitar, drums, bass, synth, percussion) is again joined by Innez Tulloch (vocals, guitar, keys, synth, bass, melodica), who is now Ford’s principle songwriting partner. Longtime Thigh Master collaborator Dusty Anastassiou (Dag, Permits) provides some guitar action on a handful of tracks. Dippers’ 2023 full-length, Clastic Rock for Goner Records, doubles down on Ford and crew’s supernatural skill at something possessed by only a tiny handful of very special entities that exist under the voluminous banner of indie-jangle / pop: immediacy. The album is filled with stop-start dynamics that work to create hooks within hooks (a trick at which this band excels). Like a lot of new favorite albums, this one was recorded and conceived of (at least partially so) during the pandemic lockdowns. Though, if one sifts through the Thigh Master discography, one might notice...

Gee Tee

Goodnight Neanderthal

Goner

BACK IN PRINT ON NEW WHITE VINYL!!! Based in Sydney, Australia and lead by the iconic Kel Mason, this band of maniacal rock ’n’ roll miscreants has been blowing drooly-punk minds for the past few years with a rash of out-of-print records and ridiculous videos that have bounced around the proper channels of the internet underbelly. A white hot set on the web-only Gonerfest 17 was greeted with cheers of joy, and ultimately re-issued as a cassette and LP. They made it over in full three-dimensional form for a completely unhinged US tour in 2022 culminating in a headlining spot at Gonerfest 19. Now Goner is proud to unleash their new album —Goodnight Neanderthal—ten blasts of spazzy lo-fi attack, full of buzzy guitars, cheap synths and earworm hooks that demand to be sung in the shower. Or in the car. Or on a bike. Gee Tee rules. Get on board or get out of the way.

Ibex Clone

All Channels Clear

Goner

Imagine a world apart from our own—an agrarian utopia where the corroded cables of the 20th century lie in moss-covered heaps and the Mississippi River runs clear. New structures rise from the detritus, gnarled patchworks of the natural world and everything else humanity left behind. This is a world where Nirvana and NAFTA never happened, punk didn’t break but bloomed, and guitars jangle in the breeze. This is the world of Ibex Clone and their new album, All Channels Clear. Formed by members of essential bands from the modern era of Memphis rock and roll, Ibex Clone reconfigures the paranoiac punk of Ex-Cult, NOTS and Hash Redactor into something altogether different, a vision of music from a timeline that split with ours a long time ago. Guitarist George Williford’s dizzy six- and twelve-string explorations form a lush thicket for Alec McIntyre’s fluid basslines to slip in and around, anchored by Meredith Lones’ steady, driving rhythms. Williford’s powerful vocal melodies ward off impending death and decay with visionary lyrics about humanity’s place in the ecosystem, the balm of love and friendship, and the complex feeling of being alive in this version of the world of tomorrow. With All Channels Clear, Ibex Clone develops the woozy, folk-tinged post-punk of their excellent debut From Nowhere into a catchy, complex approach to the pastoral power pop of XTC, the Meat Puppets, and Guided By Voices. These ten beautiful tracks tunnel back through the shredded remains of folk, pop, blues and psychedelia to rediscover the...

Beach, Michael

2022 EP

Goner

Following the highly acclaimed album Dream Violence (2021) and the recent LP re-issue of his modern underground classic Gravity/ Repulsion, Michael Beach has announced a new self-titled 12-inch EP, to be released via Goner and Poison City Records. Recorded during the winter of 2021, the new record is made up of both 8-track tape and full studio recordings, interspersed with experimental, moody interludes, and features Beach’s Australian bandmates Bonnie Mercer (guitar), Peter Warden (drums) and Carla Oliver (bass) throughout. The EP’s stunning closer “Only A Memory” is a collaboration with Lloyd Swanton of renowned Australian minimalist trio The Necks, recorded in NSW’s Blue Mountains. “Out In A Burning Alley,” the EP’s lead single, combines Beach’s soulful abstracted lyrics over two minutes and fifty eight seconds of blazing garage-rock, where the sounds of the Melbourne and Oakland / Bay Area underground collide. In support of the upcoming EP and recent Dream Violence album, Beach will be returning to tour the US in September/ October, headlining dates on the East and West coast and performing at the iconic Gonerfest in Memphis, TN. The touring outfit will also feature Beach’s long time collaborator Utrillo Kushner (Comets On Fire / Personal and The Pizzas) on drums.

Bobo, Harlan T.

Porch Songs

Goner

Too enigmatic, too laconic, and too careless about the music biz to gain fame outside of his adopted homes in Tennessee and France, Harlan T Bobo is a rare bird – a soulful, comedic, yet vicious and wholly underrated singer-songwriter, a divorced single father who seems happiest when he’s most dissolute. Porch Songs, the long-awaited next chapter in Bobo’s discography, will be released on Goner Records on August 5, 2022. Everything, and nothing, has changed: Bobo’s painfully sharp lyrics and graveled delivery are omnipresent. He still deals in unvarnished, uncomfortable truths about love. His wearied worldview, revered by his listeners, has further ossified on Porch Songs, which abounds with sad titles, worn out lyrics, and tunes about departed friends, such as “Fan,” which unravels Bobo’s memories of the late Shawn Cripps. Despite the sparse melancholy that clouds most of the album’s 13 tracks, Porch Songs is no downer. Instead, it bristles with energy, sounding like a beyond-the-grave gift bestowed on Bobo from the ghosts of Waylon Jennings, Lou Reed, and Leonard Cohen. Bobo laughs when offered the comparison. “They may be mildly derivative of those people, but they’re not that good.” Listeners will disagree. Take “Worry,” the opening song: it unwinds like Jennings’ early outlaw country tune “The Taker,” with a similar wry sentimentality that underwrites the folly of failed love. Bobo’s commiseration on the song sounds close-up and confidential, as if he’s telling his story to the stranger on the next barstool. “Satisfaction,” “Prey,” and “Fan,” on the other...

Gee Tee

Stuck Down

Goner

Sydney's unstoppable synth punk rock kings GEE TEE continue their reign over the world. You will play it, and flip it, and play it, and flip it again. Hooks galore! Do we detect perhaps a little less panic in their rock than before? Could this mark a move towards a more mature GEE TEE? We are hoping not! But hey, when you can pull of a mid-tempo anthem like "ROCK PHONE" you are in truly rarified air. Every song delivers! Every song is great! What else do you want from a record, a back rub? Behold your new favorite record from your new favorite band! This record makes you feel happy, and hopeful, and glad these lunatics are out there making music. Really have no business being able to do such a thing in such messed up times, but GEE TEE makes it happen! Full-length album coming late 2022 on Goner. Edition of 600 copies.

Lane, Fred

Car Radio Jerome

Goner

As anyone who worked in a record store from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s can relate, the two Shimmy Disc albums released by the Rev. Fred Lane were the weirdest, most bizarre, abstractly enigmatic releases any of them had ever heard. From the dadaist titles and surrealist cover artwork to the absurdly peculiar lyrics and dementedly brilliant musical bent that careened from country to jazz to Morricone-inspired Western soundtracks, From The One That Cut You and Car Radio Jerome bewitched listeners with Lane’s eccentric take on music and, by extension, life in general. Early internet chat rooms and message boards were devoted to solving the mystery. For decades, rumors swirled about them. “We would just stare at the album covers and kinda make up our own stories,” Eric Friedl of Goner Records says of the misleading recording notations, fictitious back catalogs, and vague artistic allusions that dropped mostly fake clues for Lane’s most astute fans to decipher. Then, in 2013, Lane himself surfaced at the University of Alabama for an exposition. Seven years later, Icepick To The Moon, a documentary about Lane by filmmaker Skizz Cyzyk, premiered. The film, which took more than twenty years to piece together, filled in most of the blanks that had stumped generations of fans. Learning the details of Lane’s albums doesn’t change their inscrutability. The alternate Alabama universe that Lane and his compatriots conjured up—in, of all places, the southern college football town of Tuscaloosa—is a metaphysical place as vast and imbued with...

Lane, Fred

From The One That Cut You

Goner

As anyone who worked in a record store from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s can relate, the two Shimmy Disc albums released by the Rev. Fred Lane were the weirdest, most bizarre, abstractly enigmatic releases any of them had ever heard. From the dadaist titles and surrealist cover artwork to the absurdly peculiar lyrics and dementedly brilliant musical bent that careened from country to jazz to Morricone-inspired Western soundtracks, From The One That Cut You and Car Radio Jerome bewitched listeners with Lane’s eccentric take on music and, by extension, life in general. Early internet chat rooms and message boards were devoted to solving the mystery. For decades, rumors swirled about them. “We would just stare at the album covers and kinda make up our own stories,” Eric Friedl of Goner Records says of the misleading recording notations, fictitious back catalogs, and vague artistic allusions that dropped mostly fake clues for Lane’s most astute fans to decipher. Then, in 2013, Lane himself surfaced at the University of Alabama for an exposition. Seven years later, Icepick To The Moon, a documentary about Lane by filmmaker Skizz Cyzyk, premiered. The film, which took more than twenty years to piece together, filled in most of the blanks that had stumped generations of fans. Learning the details of Lane’s albums doesn’t change their inscrutability. The alternate Alabama universe that Lane and his compatriots conjured up—in, of all places, the southern college football town of Tuscaloosa—is a metaphysical place as vast and imbued with...

Total Hell

S/t

Goner

By way of some cosmic miracle, only one Total Hell pops up when the band moniker is searched on Discogs. And that would be the band responsible for the five-song blast of heavy metal sounds at hand. Now active for about two years plus change and exported from the very metal and punk fertile New Orleans, Total Hell is DD Deth (aka Drew Owen—Sick Thoughts wheelman, Trampoline Team etc) on drums / vocals, Henry Hell (John Henry of Static Static, Heavy Lids) on bass / vocals, and guitarists Jason “Panzer” Craft (Persuaders, Tirefire) and Michael Maniac (Michael He-man of Trampoline Team).  If self-deprecation is beyond the listener’s processing skills, then please know that as self-described purveyors of the “New Wave of Shitty Heavy Metal”, Total Hell’s big-boy debut is not “shitty” in any manner whatsoever. These four recordings (“Desecrate”, “Clones From Hell”, “Violator”, and “Disfigured”) are melodic monstrosities that hit with a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling hugeness, while doing so in an economical manner. There will be no mistaking this for Broken Bones screeching out of an iPhone inside the vegan squat. On the flip, this is no Bob Rock joint. DD Deth elaborates: “Recorded on a Tascam 8-track cassette live at home (aka “The Parkway”) by Michael He-Man and the process was a nightmare. Original tape crapped out on us back in early 2020 so we had to redo the whole thing. Intros and interludes were done last minute by me with the cheapest midi keyboard on the net.” Well,...

Low Life

From Squats To Lots: The Agony & Xtc Of Low Life

Goner

Some records hit one with an instant impression of timeless brilliance, and Low Life’s Dogging is one of those records, what the wise call “an instant classic”. From Squats To Lots: The Agony And The XTC Of Low Life is more like their second album Downer Edn (read Edition), a little more withdrawn, a little more textured. Complex. Rich. Which is to say: one’s going to need some time with it. Iggy Pop’s Bowie-produced studio rock masterpieces The Idiot and Lust For Life are important reference points to this third album. Here comes success! Bowie later referred to this period of his life as profoundly nihilistic. But Iggy looked at it as the period of his life that saved him from an early grave. This confrontation is Low life lore. Sip it, and sense the recurring brilliance of Mitch Tolman’s lyrics, exploring the usual territory of gutter life, lad life, punk life, low life. The dirge. Disgust and shame in white Australia. Council housing, bills piled to the neck, substance abuse and rehabilitation, the fallen lads and lasses who stood too close to the flame, loss and loneliness, from squats to lots. Un-Australian gutter symphony. Think, like, if Poison Idea were given the kind of studio time and budget as Happy Mondays. One wouldn’t play this to a teenager. It’s not for children. This is a mature flavor, one for the adults who have had to contend with failure and hardship, medical bills and disappointed family members, betrayed lovers and...

Power Supply

In The Time Of The Sabre-toothed Tiger

Goner

After the demise of the Ooga Boogas in the Before Time, the four band members went their very separate ways. Being in that band was such an intense high pressure experience, some chillax time was well-deserved. Leon Stackpole aka Stacky recorded under the name Leon, Per Byström joined Voice Imitator, Mikey Young recorded with The Green Child and Richard Stanley played in Drug Sweat. All quite deserving projects, but it was Stackpole’s solo outing that garnered the most interest from public and industry alike. The demand for live shows led him to recruit Byström from Ooga Boogas and a guy named Brad into his touring lineup. The trio was red hot, but inevitably the venues they filled required a fuller sound so Stackpole recruited Young as well on second guitar. The gruelling touring schedule became too much for family-man Brad, so Stanley jumped in to fill his size 11s and off they went for another lap of regional Victoria. Eventually the question presented itself to this freshly-minted foursome: should they continue as Stackpole’s backing band or strike out anew with a fresh identity? The answer came in a moniker too electrifying to resist; a name as clever, enigmatic and indeed, as powerful as the band itself: Power Supply. Back in the shed, jams became songs, jokes became lyrics and long afternoons spent together became this record—listen though, and one will hear life through the lens of Stackpole and the tactile tentacles of his pals. In The Time Of The Sabre-toothed...

The Exbats

Now Where Were We

Goner

LIMITED EDITION REISSUE ON NEW CLEAR WITH GOLD SPECKS VINYL!!! On Now Where Were We, The Exbats hit the ground running like a dystopian garage rock version of the Shangri-Las, or like a message to the future from the pre-Velvet Underground doo-wop wannabe Lou Reed. The album rings bright, like a beacon in the wilderness: eminently, effortlessly catchy, and loaded with buoyant choruses that rank alongside the best chart-toppers launched by the Brill Building or Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Kenny McClain and his daughter, vocalist and drummer Inez McClain, formed the nucleus of the Exbats over a decade ago, when Inez was just 10 years old; today, Bobby Carlson rounds out the group on bass. Despite their remote location in Bisbee, Arizona, just eleven miles north of the U.S.-Mexican border, the group quickly racked up accolades citing a wealth of influences that run from cartoon quintet the Archies to punk rock originators the Avengers, and from the so-sweet-it-hurts 1910 Fruitgum Company to Los Angeles antiheroes the Weirdos. Truthfully, The Exbats embrace a wider swath of musical styles, incorporating blue-eyed soul, tongue-in-cheek country, Brit pop, psych, and R&B into their sound. The McClains describe this album as “more ambitious” than its predecessors. They tooled ninety minutes northeast to Tucson to record, per usual, with Matt Rendon at Midtown Island Studios. Months later, the Exbats emerged with an album imbued with harmoniously cautious optimism—the musical equivalent but psychological antithesis to the Brian Wilson-Tony Asher masterpiece “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” While Wilson...

Aquarian Blood

Bending The Golden Hour

Goner

With Bending The Golden Hour, the third album from Memphis, Tennessee’s Aquarian Blood, husband and wife team J.B. Horrell (Ex-Cult) and Laurel Horrell (formerly of the Nots) continue the gorgeously stripped-down and atmospheric direction set on their critically acclaimed previous effort A Love That Leads to War. While Aquarian Blood has roots as a chaotic punk rock six-piece, the band shifted gears after two raucous cassette-only releases on ZAP Cassettes, a pair of seven-inches, and 2017’s Last Nite In Paradise, released on Goner Records. After drummer Bill Curry broke his arm, the Horrells redefined Aquarian Blood, reemerging in early 2018 as the more intimate, mostly acoustic balladeers behind the staccato, fever dream sound of A Love That Leads to War. Like its immediate predecessor, Bending The Golden Hour was recorded at the Horrells’ Midtown Memphis home. The band turned over forty-three tracks to Goner co-owner Zac Ives, who handpicked seventeen songs for the album. The final result is shimmering and hopeful; as beautiful and sparse as a Rockwell Kent snowscape.

Beach, Michael

(Colored) Dream Violence

Goner

Dream Violence, Michael Beach’s fourth full-length, is an epic album that explores the duality of the human condition. Or, as Beach himself puts it, the album is about “human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time.” Dream Violence, then, addresses the existential crisis of being an artist in 2020 (and 2021). Known for his work touring with the Australian guitar pop band Thigh Master and the late, brilliantly eccentric Israeli guitarist Charlie Megira, currently the focus of a number of reissues by the Numero Group, Beach is the architect of a sound that is both well-built and ramshackle, straightforward and indeterminably complex, out of the norm yet familiar in all the best ways. This album unfolds like a revelation, filled with sonic tumbleweeds that reference Neil Young’s On The Beach, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, and the Go Betweens’ Before Hollywood. Influences ranging from the enigmatic outlier Megira to Glenn Branca to the Oblivians are combined to create a new, exhilarating sound, part of the path that Beach has been on since 2008’s Blood Courses. A veteran of year-end indie rock round-ups beginning with Golden Theft in 2013 and continuing with Gravity/Repulsion, released in 2017, Beach distills the best of those early albums and adds sharpened intent.

Beach, Michael

Dream Violence

Goner

Dream Violence, Michael Beach’s fourth full-length, is an epic album that explores the duality of the human condition. Or, as Beach himself puts it, the album is about “human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time.” Dream Violence, then, addresses the existential crisis of being an artist in 2020 (and 2021). Known for his work touring with the Australian guitar pop band Thigh Master and the late, brilliantly eccentric Israeli guitarist Charlie Megira, currently the focus of a number of reissues by the Numero Group, Beach is the architect of a sound that is both well-built and ramshackle, straightforward and indeterminably complex, out of the norm yet familiar in all the best ways. This album unfolds like a revelation, filled with sonic tumbleweeds that reference Neil Young’s On The Beach, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, and the Go Betweens’ Before Hollywood. Influences ranging from the enigmatic outlier Megira to Glenn Branca to the Oblivians are combined to create a new, exhilarating sound, part of the path that Beach has been on since 2008’s Blood Courses. A veteran of year-end indie rock round-ups beginning with Golden Theft in 2013 and continuing with Gravity/Repulsion, released in 2017, Beach distills the best of those early albums and adds sharpened intent.

Wilkins, Rev. John

Trouble

Goner

To call the Reverend John Wilkins a national treasure would not be an overstatement. He is the son of pre-war blues / folk-revival legend Reverend Robert Wilkins and he leads one of the most exciting and uplifting musical acts on the blues and gospel circuit today. His multiracial, multi-generational band blends soul, southern gospel and hill country rhythm, into a sound that has the infectious drive of hill country blues with the emotional heights of a summer tent revival. Following in the footsteps of his famous father Rev. Robert Wilkins, a blues-singer turned preacher who went from the juke joint to the pulpit, the life of Rev. John Wilkins took a similar path. But in 2020 John Wilkins’ life has been closer to a different iconic bible character, Lazarus, as he has miraculously risen after surviving a month-long stay in intensive care battling COVID 19 in a Memphis hospital. As Rev. Wilkins sings on the closing track of Trouble, “I’ve come through the storm and rain, I’ve come through the storm and rain, and I made it!” And there is much to celebrate with this resurrection. Trouble, the aptly named new album, is a confident and joy-filled statement delivering the good-news gospel message unapologetically through music influenced by Ray Charles, Junior Kimbrough, Bill Withers and of course, his father. John Wilkins is one of seven children born in Memphis, TN to Robert Wilkin. The elder Wilkins was a pre-war innovator of the blues before turning to a life of ministry.  ...

Quintron & Miss Pussycat

Goblin Alert

Goner

This would be the first proper Quintron & Miss Pussycat full-length since 2011’s Sucre Du Sauvage, and the duo’s third for Memphis Tennessee’s weirdo-rock label Goner Records. Produced by Greg Cartwright (The Oblivians / Reigning Sound) and recorded on 2-inch tape at Gainesville Florida’s PULP ARTS studio, Goblin Alert picks up where Sucre Du Sauvage left off: snotty, semi-political, trash-anthems like, “Teenagers Don’t Know Shit”, “Stroller Pollution”, and “Buc-ee’s Got A Problem”. Also, for the first time ever, Quintron and Pussycat have ditched the drum machine in favor of New Orleans jazz-basher, Sam Yoger (Babes, AJ Davilla) on drum kit, and slinky Florida man, Danny Clifton (Room 13, Jane Jane Pollock) on hollow-body guitar. The resulting vibe is some kinda tweaked-out Miami disco dipped into a Mississippi mudslide, especially the tracks featuring Biloxi talk-box master, Benny Divine (aka Benni). And for the mystery lovers, there is 3/4 power-ballad entitled, “Where’s Karen”, featuring backing vocals by Heather Lee (Room 13, Jane Jane Pollock), about a troubled girl who vanished on Mardi Gras day.

Optic Sink

S/t

Goner

With Optic Sink, Natalie Hoffmann (NOTS) creates a musical paradox: an endeavor that doesn’t really seem to belong to any particular time or place, constructed with sounds that are synthesized and stripped down, yet bristling with urgency and brutalist emotion. The project took shape in 2018, when NOTS were on a break to write and woodshed music for 3, and Hoffmann began experimenting on her four-track recorder. Optic Sink surfaced as a performance soon after, appearing at bars, venues and festivals, including Memphis Concrète and SXSW. Hoffmann drives Optic Sink in live performances and on the self-titled debut album, with percussionist Ben Bauermeister (Magic Kids, Toxie, A55 Conducta) collaborating from the co-pilot’s seat. Setting up camp on the post-punk side of the minimal electronic scene, Optic Sink eschew computers for a warmer, decidedly human soundscape. Hoffmann’s power, and the tension she generates between human and machine, evokes Maria, the rebellious teacher-turned-Maschinenmensch in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and Ripley, the swaggering, sacrificing heroine of Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise. Dadaism and the Bauhaus movement could both be cited as influences; so might the existentialist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir and the jump-cuts of Maya Deren. Written over a two-year period, the eight songs that comprise Optic Sink sound like they should’ve been recorded in a bathysphere or on a space station—instead, they were captured via analog tape at Andrew McCalla’s Bunker Audio studio in summer 2019. Bauermeister’s inventive aux percussion and drum machine work provides the backdrop, while Hoffmann stokes a proverbial furnace...

Archaeas, The

S/t

Goner

“Tension, anxiety, ominous energy, and the release that comes from vanquishing those mental foes. Specifically, vanquishing them with rock and roll.” That’s how Violet Archaea, guitarist, singer, and leader of Louisville’s The Archaeas describes the themes of their new self-titled album on Goner Records. Beginning as a one-witch band, they now perform as a perfectly-balanced rock trio with frightening power, reflecting punk rock ’n’ roll from the last fifty years—AC/DC, Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers and The Dead Boys through The Reatards and Carbonas, even early Ty Segall—but The Archaeas are young enough to soak up sounds, attitudes, riffs and turnarounds from other bands and songs and still push them into their own Battle Royale. The Archaeas’ roots make sense: the bombastic Japanese trio Guitar Wolf and Mark Sultan “I began working on the first set of Archaeas songs after seeing Wild Zero for the first time,” Violet explains. “Back then I had the drums on my feet Mark Sultan-style. We projected it on a wall and had the audio blasting through a huge PA system. I’m hugely inspired by Seiji.” That Wild Zero, a story where rock and roll superheroes Guitar Wolf come to help a trans heroine save the Earth from an influx of alien zombies, resonated with Violet might not be so surprising, as she was coming to terms with being a badass trans musician in Kentucky. As in the film, gender politics don’t dominate the Archaeas message—it’s more the anxiety and pressure of living in today’s world that...

Bloodshot Bill

Get Loose Or Get Lost

Goner

For nearly twenty years, Bloodshot Bill has shouted, snorted, cooed and crooned his way through the wild shadowland of primitive rock and roll, touring the world and collaborated with heavyweights like Jon Spencer, King Khan, the 5678’s and Deke Dickerson. Seventeen albums and over two-dozen singles later, this unstoppable Montrealeño has not slowed his manic touring and recording schedule one whit. He’s a seminal punk, a true wildman who blazes his own path to honky tonk hell with a bottomless repertoire of desperate rock and roll and insatiable R&B. That means he knows a lotta songs—not that he doesn’t wear pants. But on the right night, who knows! This spring, Bloodshot Bill will release his eighteenth album, Get Loose Or Get Lost, his second for Memphis’ Goner Records. He will be touring everywhere, continuing his twenty-year rampage with a new record and a new slew of shows—do not miss it!  “He’s a throwback to the wild ’50s / ’60s: part Stompin’ Tom, part Charlie Feathers, part Elvis, part Hasil Adkins, and these sixteen tracks of his one-man primitive rock and roll pretty much cements him as a bona-fide legend.”  —50thirdand3rd.com,   on Come And Get Your Love Right Now  “Catchy, fun, and sultry.”—Maximumrocknroll

Aquarian Blood

A Love That Leads To War

Goner

A Love That Leads To War is a clear departure in style and mood for Memphis Tennessee’s Aquarian Blood. The band’s 2017’s debut LP on Goner Records, Last Nite In Paradise, is a chaotic punk epic, rising and falling like the soundtrack to a paranoid nightmare. As a live act, the six-piece band’s sonic atrocity left clubs and house shows around Memphis on life support. The band’s follow up Goner release, A Love That Leads To War, is a more intimate offering of fifteen tracks. Indirectly sparked when full-band drummer Bill Curry was temporarily lost due to a broken arm, Aquarian Blood began playing out in February 2018 as a scaled-down, four-piece incarnation. This more personal album was written, recorded and (almost entirely) performed by founding husband / wife duo J.B. Horrell (Ex-Cult) and NOTS alum Laurel Horrell. Just grazing the surface of the album can draw a line backwards from the acoustic entirety of A Love That Leads To War to Aquarian Blood’s unsettling past. The opening track “There’s A World” is a finger-picked fever dream nailing the rarified “beauty jumps into bed w/ horror” sweet spot so squarely one can’t believe it’s not a cover of some hippy hangover perfection dating back to the Nixon administration. It’s no first-song / best-song hat trick, but rather a deft setup of the next thirty-nine minutes. “No Place I Know,” “In the Water,” and “Their Dream” would fit in well in the shimmier side of the Shimmy Disc catalog, and “Thought...

Aquarian Blood

(colored) A Love That Leads To War

Goner

A Love That Leads To War is a clear departure in style and mood for Memphis Tennessee’s Aquarian Blood. The band’s 2017’s debut LP on Goner Records, Last Nite In Paradise, is a chaotic punk epic, rising and falling like the soundtrack to a paranoid nightmare. As a live act, the six-piece band’s sonic atrocity left clubs and house shows around Memphis on life support. The band’s follow up Goner release, A Love That Leads To War, is a more intimate offering of fifteen tracks. Indirectly sparked when full-band drummer Bill Curry was temporarily lost due to a broken arm, Aquarian Blood began playing out in February 2018 as a scaled-down, four-piece incarnation. This more personal album was written, recorded and (almost entirely) performed by founding husband / wife duo J.B. Horrell (Ex-Cult) and NOTS alum Laurel Horrell. Just grazing the surface of the album can draw a line backwards from the acoustic entirety of A Love That Leads To War to Aquarian Blood’s unsettling past. The opening track “There’s A World” is a finger-picked fever dream nailing the rarified “beauty jumps into bed w/ horror” sweet spot so squarely one can’t believe it’s not a cover of some hippy hangover perfection dating back to the Nixon administration. It’s no first-song / best-song hat trick, but rather a deft setup of the next thirty-nine minutes. “No Place I Know,” “In the Water,” and “Their Dream” would fit in well in the shimmier side of the Shimmy Disc catalog, and “Thought...

Thigh Master

(colored) Now For Example

Goner

Here it is! Brisbane (via Melbourne), Australia-based quartet Thigh Master are back with the long awaited second album Now For Example—the follow up to their 2016 debut Early Times. Following a string of sold-out singles as well as tours of U.S., Japan and Europe, the guitar-pop-guardians of the Brisbane underground deliver this latest, a twelve song hook-laden exertion, filled with imperious string bends and riffage framing witty tales of lethargic social observation, concocted by band leader Matthew Ford.  Now For Example sees the most compelling and virtuosic combination of Thigh Master members to date, with Innez Tulloch (guitar / keys), Dusty Anastassiou (drums) and Daniel Ford (bass) contributing heavily to its foundations and creating a bulk of their parts off-the-cuff during recording sessions, which took place in various houses between Melbourne and Brisbane. The intervals of ragged, jangly guitar riffs interspersed with waves of distorted sonic mischief recall the late ’80s / early ’90s Flying Nun sound of The Clean, Bats and 3Ds.

Thigh Master

Now For Example

Goner

Here it is! Brisbane (via Melbourne), Australia-based quartet Thigh Master are back with the long awaited second album Now For Example—the follow up to their 2016 debut Early Times. Following a string of sold-out singles as well as tours of U.S., Japan and Europe, the guitar-pop-guardians of the Brisbane underground deliver this latest, a twelve song hook-laden exertion, filled with imperious string bends and riffage framing witty tales of lethargic social observation, concocted by band leader Matthew Ford.  Now For Example sees the most compelling and virtuosic combination of Thigh Master members to date, with Innez Tulloch (guitar / keys), Dusty Anastassiou (drums) and Daniel Ford (bass) contributing heavily to its foundations and creating a bulk of their parts off-the-cuff during recording sessions, which took place in various houses between Melbourne and Brisbane. The intervals of ragged, jangly guitar riffs interspersed with waves of distorted sonic mischief recall the late ’80s / early ’90s Flying Nun sound of The Clean, Bats and 3Ds.

Nots

3

Goner

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork.  At first glance, 3 seems like a perfectly fitting title for a new Nots album. After all, it is the Memphis band’s third full-length and their first as a trio. Makes sense. But peeling back the layers reveals the spirit of the record: “Once we really leaned into the space that being a three-piece afforded us, our writing started to make better sense and connect,” explains guitarist-keyboardist-vocalist Natalie Hoffmann. “It made for a more interesting record than if we stayed comfortable and safe in the way we were writing.”  “More interesting” is a classic hard undersell. When Alexandra Eastburn left Nots in 2018, the threat of losing the gnarled texture or her hammering synth progressions resulted in some real growing pains for the band. But once the threesome arrived in Memphis to record with trusted engineer and friend Andrew McCalla, each member had embraced this fresh identity. Rather than abandon the noisy synth attack, Hoffmann instead decided to add another role to her expanding sonic arsenal, painting the backgrounds of tracks with melting buzzes and swirling waves. After the record began to take form, it felt much more accurate to understand 3 as a different force altogether from its Goner predecessors, Cosmetic (2016) and We Are Nots (2014). Themes of lost control and societal division are spread throughout the album. They can be heard not only via Hoffmann’s reverb-drenched drawl, but also in the sneaky tightness between drummer Charlotte...

Hash Redactor

Drecksound

Goner

A quick glance at the résumés of Hash Redactor’s members might seed certain expectations. The band is fronted by guitarist Alec McIntyre of Ex-Cult, with NOTS rhythm warriors Meredith Lones on bass and Charlotte Watson on drums, and rounded off by George Williford on second guitar. But their debut full-length dives into territory that feels distinctly untethered from their lineage and era. Drecksound is a clattering, shambolic oasis in the sleek digital desert of the late twenty-teens.  Perhaps both because and in spite of the alienation that typifies the glut of rock music at the end of this god-damned decade, these twelve songs deliver a pointed social criticism, more cathartic than suffocating, while championing a nihilism that greets the abyss by laughing mockingly in its face. The chorus to the incendiary “Step 2: Success” is sneered, not sung, “It’s a long con job and you just got it wrong / banned from the world.” McIntyre’s lyrics present a puckish fascination with humankind’s rake-stepping self destruction. He’s a merry prankster, but more in the mold of a jackbooted Monty Python character than a Ken Kesey acid casualty. McIntyre and Williford’s guitar interplay snakes in, out and around Lones’s bass lines, which alternate between slinky earworm hooks and steel cable raw power. All of this is locked in by Watson’s characteristically visceral swing. It doesn’t feel controversial to claim that Watson and Lones constitute one of the best rhythm sections in contemporary punk music. Having played out heavy in 2018 with...

Low Life

Downer Edn

Goner

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.3 rating from Pitchfork.  The whole “five band years = a lifetime” biz trope is justified, if not negated, by the second album from Sydney’s Low Life. Arriving with an aura of anticipation, Downer Edn (read: Edition) feels like a collective document of the band’s timeline since their unforgettable debut Dogging—an album which made enough of a mark on the punk landscape in 2014 to justify a reissue on London’s Alter in 2017.   Recorded over two years and mixed in 2018 by Mikey Young (Total Control / Eddy Current Suppression Ring), Downer Edn sees the core trio of Mitch Tolman, Cristian O’Sullivan and Greg Alfaro expand their ranks to a five piece. Dizzy Daldal of Oily Boys & Orion was brought in to reinforce the thick wall of guitars, whilst fifth member Yuta Matsumura, also of Oily Boys & Orion, re-joined the group later to free Tolman up as a dedicated front man for live duties. The hours of studio work have resulted in making the band sound more confident and fully realised, reaching for and finding a sound that was perhaps unattainable five years prior. However, lurking behind the bigger vision and polished production is a complex proposition and a dark blast of an album.   As far as Australian punk is concerned, this album not only shatters the boundaries, it does so with the lushest attack conceivable. Like their (admitted) influence, the enigmatic Ohio legends of obscurity, V3, seldom has...

Bloodshot Bill

Come And Get Your Love Right Now

Goner

The one-man hurricane known as Bloodshot Bill started in his hometown of Montreal around 1998, with just a guitar and a stomp board. Since then, he’s had over 35 releases throughout Europe and North America. He keeps a jam-packed calendar, juggling insane live shows all over the world with the requisite studio time, where the magic often happens with a star-studded stack of cohorts including The 5.6.7.8.’s, Jon Spencer, King Khan, Beat Poet Charles Plymell, Mark Sultan, Deke Dickerson and Shannon Shaw of Shannon & The Clams. Although this pistol plays well with others, there’s a reason he’s known as the greatest living one-man band. Artist Joe Coleman once called him “a cross between Jimmie Rodgers and Popeye,” and director John Waters says he’s “like Roy Orbison with a head wound.” There have been some movie roles (usually playing himself), and accolades, too—he has won FME’s Coup De Coeur, and has been a nominee three times for an Ameripolitan Music Award. Bloodshot Bill’s whacked-out take on rockabilly stroll and early R & B begins where Charlie Feathers’ cryptic mumble meets Bobby Lee Trammell’s uninhibited beat and then goes scampering down dark alleys beyond genres—plus, it’s catchy as hell! Come Get Your Love Right Now is his seventh album, and first for Goner, after several with the great purveyors of forgotten sounds, Norton Records. Dig the unhinged howl, that loose-stringed strum, his unique beat. Go bang your head on a bongo—come and get it!

Boss

Steel Box / I'm The Dog (you're The Ball)

Goner

Comprised of R’n’R lifers Jonah Falco (Fucked up, Career Suicide) and Maxime Smadja (Rixe), Boss deliver a raw vision of real Rock and Roll in the early half of the 21st century. The track “Steel Box” rides a nasty distorted slide guitar riff that adds a sleazy '70s rock feel to an irresistibly catchy chorus. “I’m the Dog (You’re the Ball)” picks up the pace and nods in a Motörhead-meets-street-punk direction, starting off with a teasing quick lick and ripping through an intense 2 minutes. This wax has energy and an authority that warrants their name: BOSS. Believe it!

Carbonas

Your Moral Superiors: Singles And Rarities

Goner

Fast, tight, and irresistibly tuneful, Atlanta’s Carbonas took America by storm in the mid-2000s with a slew of catchy singles and hit-laden albums. The group dragged into its orbit some of the best and brightest of Atlanta’s burgeoning punk scene, launching careers and developing a rabid fan following (and inspiring at least five tattoos). At the height of their popularity, they disbanded, leaving the masses clamoring for more material. As songwriters, the band were incredibly prolific, gradually developing from a lo-fi treble blast (à la Rip-Off Records) into a finely tuned Euro-punk steamroller, and drummer / producer Dave Rahn was there to record all of it. For the past decade, however, many of these tracks languished on four-track cassettes, hard drives, and out-of-print singles and compilations. Finally, as they enter their twilight years and reflect on their legacy in the face of impending death, the Carbonas have decided to give these tracks to the world. Ryan Bell (Scavenger Of Death Records) was tasked with raiding the archives and tracking down tapes and files, as well as sequencing and mixing audio, wrangling posters, flyers and liner notes and cover layout. Goner Records is proud to present this collection of all the hits and misses from Atlanta’s finest.

Sick Thoughts

Sick Thoughts

Goner

BACK IN PRINT ON NEW RED VINYL!!! If you don’t know Sick Thoughts, you don’t know punk. The band is the mighty Drew Owen. Baltimore born and bred, he then up and moved to the swamps of New Orleans while still a teenager. The general consensus was he’d be another casualty of The Big Easy decadence, and would soon be seen hitting up tourists for money on Bourbon Street with a dog on a rope. But somehow he got hooked up with the best (worst?) folks in the city and kept making great music. That, and the fact that forty-ounce bottles just bounce off his head, have kept him alive. Rock and roll romance and the promise of socialized health care sent him to the (imaginary?) home of Killed By Death punk, Helsinki, Finland. Which makes perfect sense—this album is like the perfect KBD record, full of buzzsaw guitars, machine gun drums and hooks that hit like a tire iron. Owen’s brand of aural early-20s angst, with doses of Zero Boys, Reatards, and early Crüe, mixed with the stench of the streets, has never sounded better. This album clearly puts Sick Thoughts on top of the punk heap. It’s Owen’s world—get in it!

V/a

Sore Losers

Goner

Reissue of an out-of-time and ahead-of-its time garage rock soundtrack to the typically out-of-his-mind Mike McCarthy aka JMM movie Sore Losers. The film is full of aliens, comic books, rednecks, zombies, boobs, gals, gals fighting, and rock ‘n’ roll. Starring the Oblivians’ Jack Oblivian, with Guitar Wolf, Mike Maker, the deliciously curvy D’Lana Tunnell, and a guest appearance by exploitation master David F. Friedman himself.  Anyone who has seen his movies can attest to the fact that Mike McCarthy always overdelivers. Sore Losers is as good / bad an example as any. Whole soundtracks would be filled out around just one of the acts on this thing—case in point, Greg Oblivian doing a toy instrument version of the much-loved “Bad Man” that is worth the price of the record by itself. Plus The Gories / Dirtbombs’ Mick Collins, The Makers, Jack Oblivian himself, and the mighty Guitar Wolf! Also New Orleans garage/ frat kings Royal Pendletons, Jeffrey Evans of the Gibson Bros with his ’68 Comeback, and also featuring Jack Taylor, the most amazing / fucked up guitar player ever. His guitar tone started with the legendarily messed-up solo in the Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call My Name” and then added four fuzz pedals to it, creating modern art! RIP Jack Taylor. There is also Nick Diablo of Viva L’American Death Ray Music, The Drags, The Makers, Tim Feleppa, Gasoline… This is quality ’90s garage rock, still raw and vital as ever.  This rerelease coincides with McCarthy’s...