Punk & Metal & Country & Western Civilization Roundup

Records!

This week, I will be fifty years old. Or, as I like to think of it, “eleven years till Steve Albini time.” Existentialism feels particularly grotesque in a season of mass annihilation, and I’m not (quite) enough of a centrist hack to keep shouting “but… but… the black plague! The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire! WW1! Biafra! Etc!” as the water rises around me. That the water never quite gets my soft and supple toes wet doesn’t matter. Like you, I’m an empath. My feelings are soaked. If I was better at paying my taxes, it’d be blood. But let’s not be dramatic. Let’s just say that, as a citizen, I am complicit, which puts me in a terrible mood. Also I’m pretty scared of death. I do believe in Paradise but, for various reasons I won’t get into here, I’d like to get a few more good deeds under my belt before the great Songs About Fucking comes down. I’ve been donating to Doctors Without Borders, Books Through Bars, and the GoFundMe accounts of artists I don’t even like. My spending on Bandcamp albums I will never listen to all the way through is at an all time high. I heart everybody’s instagram posts now. I may see about voting for Zohran Mamdani twice. 

Point being: pretty good time for an album roundup. Here’s some recent albums I like very much, all of which I’d have covered in CREEM if their labels’ checks had cleared. 

RECORDS!

Siyahkal Days of Smoke and Ash / روزای دود و خاکستر (Static Shock)

I love “psych-hardcore.” It just means motorik hardcore with echoing vocals, which is funny because doing motorik beats on songs under six minutes is like spinning out on the autobahn every fifty feet. As someone who believes in walkable cities and public transportation, I appreciate the subliminal anti-getting-anywhere message. Siyahkal are the newest and bestest in the briefly crowded field of Destino Final-core. The lyrics are in Farsi, which means that Siyahkal joins bands such as Prostitute and Haram in having to play that rare kind of punk with actual stakes attached (with due credit given to Ola Herbich, the owner of Quality Control HQ, who is looking at a long prison stretch in the UK, as one of the Filton 18, for choosing to take on those same stakes in solidarity with the Palestinians currently being ethnically cleansed by the Israeli apartheid state). Having stakes attached by circumstances—as opposed to being able to just live free—sucks on a moral and geopolitical level, but I won’t pretend that the freight of history and the individual guts displayed here don’t absolutely bang on an aesthetic level. An essential hardcore record, and it’s cruel that it has to be.

Labrador My Version Of Desire (Safe Suburban Home)

Pity the poor rock critic whose dreams of being otherwise haven’t yet been crushed out of them. Pour one out for the Domestic Drafts, Paranoid Styles (not to mention us singers in Publicist UK), sending out abashed emails about our new albums to our worse dressed peers, begging them to look past all our good taste to the dumb & primal likability that our mothers assured us was as present in our songs as anything by those idiots in Nirvana (who never even went to Simon’s Rock). Pity twice Pat King, head auteur of Philly’s Labrador, who quit criticism to play for the opposing team in publicity, with the result being he’s forced to do the job for free, shilling his own art like some sort of door-to-door vagrant. How many hours must he have agonized whether to include “RIYL Reigning Sound” in his own band’s bio, knowing full well he was drawing comparisons which, if he got lucky, might otherwise go to Van Morrison. 

Luckily our vaccinated protagonist made the right choice in heroes, with Labrador not even needing the (very clever) “Maximum Alt-country” t-shirts to make his self-awareness winning rather than excruciating. If he’s still within the Reigning Sound tradition, it’s in his similarly fine and resonately high-warbled voice, which ain’t his fault or remotely a negative. The songs on My Version of Desire are bashing-ly melodic, with sharp enough lyrics (without being showy, which I envy), to stand out as boho-alt Americana takes on the Memphis sound, amongst others, rather than a mere approximation of Greg Cartwright doing an approximation of Swamp Dogg. And there are enough clever (but not too clever) zigs amongst the zags to qualify Labrador as part of the new wave/pub rock tradition (think: Stiff Records), where having a good record collection isn’t held against you. 

Habak Mil orquídeas en medio del desierto (Persistent Vision)

On the title track of Habak’s new LP (“A thousand orchids in the middle of the desert” in English), these Tijuana epic-crust-ureans tastefully drop in death metal gang grunts into the choruses, possibly inventing emo-death. But not really because “emo-death” sounds like it would be awful and, when Habak does it, it rules so hard that hearing it feels like what I imagine it felt like when Darwin discovered his first merman. The rest of the album is what you’d hope for from one of the better bands marching forth in Tragedy’s footsteps: pummelling drums and anguished, violent wailing against empire, with guitars as painterly pretty as anything by Renoir. On “Notas sobre el olvido” (notes on forgetting), Habak even prove that they could write an (actually good) Goo Goo Dolls song if they wanted, if Alejandra Valdez was interested in getting paid in sentiment/money rather than exorcising pangean levels of trauma in every other verse. And if the track’s gently strummed acoustic guitar accompanying Valdez’s brief foray into loveliness didn’t lead into the next song’s gently strummed electric, and then another blackened-Iggy grunt before the cavalcade starts all over again. 

Languid Shove Their System Up Their Ass (Desolate Records)

The best blog in the universe, Terminal Sound Nuisance, recently ended a 21-part series (entitled  “Last Night a D-Beat Saved My Life”) of appreciations of bands that sound almost exactly like Discharge. In wrapping things up, the author wrote “This is going to be the last part of this wonderful series and I won't probably be writing about d-beat for a good few years because I have officially run out of epithets and attributes to qualify this peculiar emphatically and crucially redundant punk subgenre.” I write about d-beat bands a few times a year and, not being as talented as Terminal Sound Nuisance in that particular medium, I was in the same boat probably five years ago. Especially since I have a rule against doing the thing that painted-into-a-d-beat-corner d-beat publicists, token d-beat writers at metal sites, and MRR volunteers of all stripes, are forced to do in order to justify their existences i.e. pretend that any of this is remotely original or that “on their new album, Montreal upstarts Dischooge play traditional punk, but with a modern twist.” Because, and I mean this as no insult, there is never a modern twist. The modern twist is that the d-beat band in question is the d-beat being written about on that particular, inarguably modern, day. Punk energy, after all, when “infused with punk energy” is just more mayo on a mayo sandwich. Delicious, yes. Viscous, absolutely. But after a certain point, even “extra mayo” loses its meaning. So I’m delighted to be able to recommend Languid’s newest album, Shove Their System Up Their Ass, without reservation or distinction. It’s great d-beat, played and recorded like great d-beat. Completely unessential but also necessary if you don’t currently have any d-beat or mötorpunk playing in your ears at this very moment. Quick! Put this on! It’s exactly what you need, and the singer sounds a little like Paul Bearer! But more like the guy from Disfear! 

Originality isn’t an inherent virtue. Know who’s original? Radiohead. And how’s loving that band of fucknuts going for you? Good? 

SEX FACES Bad Vibes OST (Slovenly)

With this patriotic celebration of two of America’s finest cultural institutions (scum rock and the S.C.U.M. manifesto), Sex Faces are bringing back the Summer of (death valley) ‘69. Nice! Nobody told these scalliwags that D.C. kids aren’t allowed to like Pussy Galore, so I guess all those Unrest fans died during Revolution Summer for nothing. Oh well! I also don’t think anyone told Sex Faces that Pussy Galore were kind of full of shit and kind of sucked (except for the couple times they kind of ruled), so these freaks fuck up their pastiche entirely by both meaning it and not sucking even once. Guess Unrest gets the last laugh after all.

If the band needs another pullquote that will help move a negative amount of units, here ya go: “Imagine if Action Swingers was led by Julia Cafritz.” 

(I know. With ripped-from-the-headlines references like that, it’s hard to believe I’m turning fifty.) 

EXTRA Sex Faces content: Here's a swell interview with the band from my social betters over at see/saw. 

Savak SQUAWK! (Peculiar Works)

Which brings us to another proud American institution. Almost a folk tale, really (like the headless horseman, freedom, etc.), in that if enough obscure D.C. hardcore references are spoken aloud in a newsletter, the flowers of Ulysses/romance known as Savak will appear, leaving their victims ravished by their neo-mod racket and fatally informed about current events and the Empire discography. As prickly as a prickly pear and as effortlessly tuneful as a prickly pear that used to be in OBITS and now plays in a note-perfect Minimalist R&B band, Savak can do no wrong. On SQUAWK!, they continue not doing just that.

The Austerity Program Bible Songs 2

The second best (after Sisters of Mercy, and tied with Godflesh and the Three Johns) drum machine metal band in the universe are back, with more blackly fab songs about the Saw-levels of arbitrarily applied jerkery which God displays throughout ye olde testament. Standing athwart a mean and capricious divinity with nothing but brains to blow, charisma to burn, and a couple sonic reducers plugged into the di, Austerity Program put more motion into their rhetorical/spiritual ocean than all the small-dick New Atheists combined. Bands like this are why I believe in God though. I can buy that science gave us METZ, but this calibre of noise rock can only come from the Mystery. So… checkmate, Austerity Program, I guess. Hoisted by your own bad-ass, bombastic, and profoundly emoted petards. 

Trigger Warning: with nothing but love for both Austerity Program and their now deceased patron saint, I’m afraid that, for my admittedly delicate sensibilities, Steve Albini’s (much repented) edgelord past casts too long a shadow for any like-constipated bass-tards to sing about sexual assault (even/especially in the context of the Bible) without it feeling as unpleasant as I suppose it’s intended to feel. Artistically valid, and certainly not indicative of any Austerity Programmers individual edgelordship, but I’m still skipping “Judges 19:22-29” (track 2) whenever it comes on. It makes me feel awful. Again, that might speak to its potency but nonetheless consider yourself trigger warned. 

Fugitive Bubble What Will Happen If We Stop? (Sorry State)

On their second album of new wave truther Americana (ugh, fine… “-core”), Olympia’s Fugitive Bubble are in their golden era (1983). All the wild mess is in bracing harmony with the pesky demands of talent. But I won’t lie; if they’re gonna keep getting better at writing songy-songs, keep having the dual(ing) riot city/college town vocals pushed up in the mix, and have the drums get canonical-y sicker and sicker, I’m even more excited for the fourth album where—if they adhere to their spiritual pappies’ blueprint—they sign to Restless Records, spend a month overproducing the snare, and alienate all fifteen of their fans (and then break up). I know it’s going to be my favorite record of 2028. 

Thanks for reading. Please share and subscribe.

Also, please subscribe to CREEM (check out newest issue for my profile of Lambrini Girls) and plz check out my recent Quietus essay on AC/DC. As always, Nouristan Foundation, Zohra stuff, me stuff. See you around. (also please, for the love of God, don't buy me a birthday gift. If so inclined, donate to any of the charities linked above and way above.) (OK, you can also get me the Daughn Gibson All Hell LP)