Sick Thoughts-Deformation demo CS (2013)

I make an effort to post all sorts of music on Drug Punk, but Baltimore's Sick Thoughts is what I started it all for. Crude, lo-fi, loner rock that will never be popular among the masses. As usual with this sort of music, there's a crucial distinction between your records sounding like shit 'cause you're consciously aping a style, on one hand, and sounding like shit 'cause you're too poor and/or fucked up and/or ignorant to do otherwise, on the other. Sick Thoughts is definitively in the latter category, and kudos to this dood.

If you made it through that paragraph, you already have a pretty good sense of what Sick Thoughts sounds like. He's even cruder, however, than most of the lofi trash I post here: at several points on the tape, in fact, the guitar and drum(machine) are out of sync. My favorite track is "Something I don't Have": it opens with directionless tone, then the ram-bam-fuckyouma'am (almost) 4'4 time sleaze kicks in. Dood talk-sings like a drugged newscaster about "you and your bullshit," and I caught the drums sliding out of time at least twice. The song is so crude and slipshod it sounds like two tracks were mixed on top of each other without anyone noticing. "Ugly" continues the descent into wasted oblivion: choppy, clipped drumming and trashed guitar patterns partially mask the drunken burble-singing. "Ugly" is so crude, it's almost avant-garde at times. Fucking majestic.

 The blown-out 4-track (lack of) recording value and slurred vocals make for a grey, muddy porridge overall. This demo is the perfect soundtrack for drunken apathy, being depressed while zonked on speed, drinking too much cheap red wine too fast, yelling at your significant other when s/he is trying to help you out of your self-induced misery, and in general being a stupid dumbshit. I've done all of those activities, so I know what sounds good while executing said idiocies. This.

Make some bad decisions and get fucked to SICK THOUGHTS! Dood is apparently opening for Oblivians in August, so any drummers in the Bodymore area should help him out by playing. Stay tuned for more from this guy, which I'm hoping will be forthcoming very soon.

The Shrills-Ghoul Kids

In case you're wondering why I stopped accepting new releases for review recently, this is a good example: it's a great record I received for review about a year and a half ago, and never listened to because it was buried in a pile of other submissions (in addition, I still pretend to have a social life while acting like an adult at times to earn a paycheck).

If you come to DrugPunk for the dirtyassrock'n'roll and loath my forays into other genres, you'll love this. Shrills is as much fun as making out in a bar bathroom after your eighth beer of the night. "Coconuts" is as sweet as the aforementioned fruit. It blatantly rips off a punk song whose title I can't think of. There's nothing complex about this band: it's just direct, unabashed garage punk that I'm pretty sure Californians were great at before they all started listening to Drake and Lady Gaga (or whatever it is my students love currently). There are moments of complexity-"Pink Hotel" veers dangerously close to Sex Church as far as guitars go-but this is mainly just straightahead garage fun. "Chthulu," however, is in a world of its own: it's six minutes of menacing, slow-motion cinematic tension that slowly segues into lurching, heavy caveman rock a la Bleach-era Nirvana. Totally makes the kids go crazy, I'm guessing.

Put quite simply, if I had gotten around to listening to this it woulda been in my Top 10 for 2011.
I dunno if any physical copies of the tape are left, but if so, BUY IT HERE!!!!

Tonfiski Olja-s/t EP (2013)

Well, there's just no telling what the kiddies is gonna come up with these days, is there? For example: Tonfiski Olja, from eastern Finland. Most readers associate Finland with a robust, and robustly entertaining, hardcore punk scene. Among other gems, Finnish punks brought us aviator bands as a fashion accessory (look it up), as well as a horde of great bands I won't bother naming. Tonfiski Olja, however, is having none of that homegrown noisepunk slop.
That ain't what we got here. Tonfiski Olja's four tracks fall somewhere between a garage punk band still mastering its instruments and Submission Hold. I don't know if anyone remembers the latter band but T.O. reminds me of the contorted, plodding post-punk S.H. was dishing out around 2000. It's a strange mixture of juvenile punk rage and more complex song structures, and I still can't decide if it works. "Korrosio" is the best song here: spitfire drumming and simple, propulsive guitarwork that the singer shouts and howls over in blistering Finnish. Then there's the inevitable quasi-breakdown that you can't drag your knuckles to because it's a bit too clever for that. That's just it: when you think T.O. is a bunch of caveman ponx, they end up being clever songwriters. This band is just going with their instincts, and in an age when everyone is doing their best to sound like someone else, I commend that.

Get into it HERE.

Ruptures-Deca LP (2013)

*Disclaimer: If you're 20 or younger, you're probably going to be pissed off by this review and condemn me for sneering at original young talent. Thus, ignore this and just check out Rupture's bandcamp page.*

Despite my better judgment, and every adult bone in my body (yes, there are some), this is a fun listen. If you're in your mid-20s, consider yourself an ex-punk, yet still love getting drunk to aural ignorance like American Nightmare, you know what I mean. Somewhere around 21, healthy people are supposed to outgrow the sort of bratty, immature noise represented by Ruptures. Healthy is the last adjective anyone would use to describe me or my dirtbag friends, though. Speaking of immature, Ruptures even includes the sort of instrumental bridge ("Rice") that Bane used to good effect on It All Comes Down to This. There's something about snippets of acoustic guitar that add more dignity to hardcore records than they otherwise would (should) have.

I was getting blackout drunk with a friend awhile ago and he was bemoaning the lack of top notch ignorant HC these days. He's right. Most bands are so fixated on sounding like [fill in the blank of a DC/Swedish/Japanese/Italian/LA band ca. 1982 here] that they forgot that half the fun of hardcore is just turning the distortion up to 10 and going berserk in a puerile sorta way. Ruptures proves him wrong, however. If I didn't have braces and glasses, this is the sort of music I would crowdsurf to. Heavy, heavy, heavy guitar, frenetic drumming that hammers and hammers and hammers away at you, a screeching/yowling/dyspeptic singer and breakdowns so fucking colossal they might be part of the Great Wall of China. And the sincerity...it's damn near suffocating. Anyone as hopeless as Ruptures insists they are on "Lack" wouldn't be nearly as passionate as they are.

Whatever, though-sincerity is a vice of youth, and this is a genuinely fun hardcore album in an age I assumed was inimical to such a thing. It all comes down to this!

Love in vain: A Rembtika mix

 "Come back here when you've learned to sin"-paraphrase of Sam Phillips to Johnny Cash, 1950s.

When you're down and out and in the darkest recesses of alcohol-induced torpor, you'd do worse than to discover rembetika. What is rembetika, you ask? A short and highly simplified definition: A south Aegean genre that probably originated in the Ionian cities and Constantinople. It arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and blossomed in the Piraeus after the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-23 and the Population Exchange of 1923. Musically, rembetika is an eastern Mediterranean phenomenon that I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to comment on. Lyrically, topics included love (and loss thereof), drugs, crime, and the dissolute lifestyle any reasonable person would have lived at the time, given the conditions (in Turkey, a terminally decaying Ottoman Empire and mutual atrocities after World War I culminating in this, and in Greece the Venizelos and Metaxas dictatorships, followed by a horrific Nazi occupation). The men and women that made rembetika lived fast, died young, and most of them only recorded 2 or 3 songs, at most, before vanishing in a haze of nargila and ouzo. That's a worse record than American blues musicians.

Speaking of which, if you love the American blues, these folks in the Aegean littoral were on the same page as Charley Patton and Skip James, at the same time. They were just getting wasted on hash and raki melo instead of whiskey and weed. The music, structurally, isn't similar. But the fierce joy in the face of suffering is. It's the sort of attitude that says to the world, "Yeah. You suck, you dealt me a shit hand. But so what? Life is beautiful, and I'm going to have as much fun as I can while I'm here, so pass the booze!"
Antonis Kostis (Αντώνης Κωστής) -a pseudonym for Kostis Vezos (Κωστής Βέζος) -was one of the baddest muthafuckas of this genre as far as I'm concerned. He recorded a handful of songs in the 1920s and '30s, including some Hawaiian slide guitar cuts that aren't as trite as you'd think. He died in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of Greece. Check out his music. 

I first heard examples of rembetika when I was much younger and didn't come 'round to it until recently, after a lot of disgusting living. Maybe the listening experience is different if you're Greek, but for me, these are songs of experience, in Blake's words. It's hard to like this music if you haven't lived in the world long enough to get dirty, shameful, filthy, sinful, and still come up loving life no matter what it throws in your face.

CHECK IT OUT.  I cobbled together this mix from various rembetika compilations. The most comprehensive collection is, undoubtedly, the Greek Music from the Underworld series. A fantastic single-volume introduction is the Cafe Rembetika LP. Mississippi Records' Bed of Pain compilation is, of course, out of print, but they also released a discography of Marika Papagika's recorded output, which you can buy here.


Track listing:
1. Νίκος Πουρπουράkης-The Offenders
2. Α. Κωστής -Τουμβελεkή
3. Στρατός Ραγιουμτζής -Minor Key Song from the Taverna
4. Σταυροσ Ρεμουνδχος -Μάνες Χιτζασκιάρ Πιρεοτικός
5. Ανεσθης Δαλγας -Καροτσιέρης (The Coachman)
6. Στεφαναυα Γ. Πενχεβυα-Σελσκα Ρατσχεντιτζα
7. Στελλάκης Περπινιαδχης-Μάγγες, Μου Συμοφορθίτε!
8. Ρόσα Εσκενάζι - in the Taverna with the "Laterna"
9. Cavadhias Popular Orchestra-Karsilamas Tekirdag
10. Γιοργιοσ Κατσαρός-[untitled]
11. Εφ. Ραγιουμιδζης-Σφουγγαραδχες ("The Sponge Divers")
12. Κ. Ρουκούνας -Μη Μου Λες βος Δεν Με Θελήσ ("Don't Say that You Don't Want me")
13. Ρένα Στάμου-Bed of Pain
14. Γιώργιος Τράkης-Τα μάγια στο πηγάδι

Greek-speaking/-reading readers, please let me know if I've made any glaring errors in this post. I did the best I could with transliterating the song titles and performers' names; if any of you can help me, get in touch.
I know that the last track, by Giorgios Trakis, isn't rembetika, strictly speaking, but it's beautiful and deserves a wider audience.

Cruelster-demo CS (2012)

There's not much to say about this cassette, but it's all positive. The songs are laughably crude, and as so often with punk, that's a good thing. This sounds like 3 or 4 teenagers in a basement in the middle of nowhere playing what they think punk is supposed to sound like, with more enthusiasm than skill, and it's great. What it doesn't sound like is a bunch of nerds precisely combining different elements of [insert big-time punk band here] in order to get on the Chaos in Tejas bill.

Of course, I know nothing about Cruelster, but that's the image I'm goin' with. The guitar parts sound like they were cut and pasted together with the singer shout-singing over the bludgeoning rhythm section. It's the first punk tape I've heard in awhile that makes me wanna throw beer bottles at passing strangers and pick fights with my room mates. Especially with "Crisis in local government," which could very well be the best piss-take on UK Oi! I've heard in years.

So go get fucked to the mellifluous sound of Cruelster!

Michael Wohl-Moonfeeder/Songs of Impermanence 7" (2013)

 As the Valdarno heats up, a nocturnal lifestyle is becoming more and more appealing: the daytime here is so hot it's like walking into an oven when I go out to buy a beer, so the day's become night and nighttime, like Fogerty said, is the right time.

Just in time for the Tuscan summer comes this bit of spartan folk from Seattle. As on Wohl's 2012 demo, this is barebones, standalone guitar music. In many ways, the demo was a tribute  to the blues and Americana influences that Wohl proudly wears on his sleeve. These two songs, however, find him starting to work out his own idiom within that tradition. His playing is thoroughly indebted to Fahey, still, but "Moonfeeder" is more measured than Fahey's spry, even effusive, plucking. The guitar is almost melancholic at times, without being heavy-handed. Wohl ends the tune with a flourish of upbeat plucking, though; an overnight train journey and not an all-night bender, perhaps, is the setting.
"Song of Impermanence" sounds like a tighter, more coherent reworking of the loose, improvised "Melatonin Blues," my favorite tune from the 2012 demo. The piece is a bit of lonesome midnight solitude crafted in a jaunty form. Around 4:21 the song soars off into ethereal heights, closing on a note of perfect, spacy elegance.

The musos among my readers will enjoy this two-song EP for the masterful guitarwork. The rest of us can get into it for the mood. Either way, give this a spin next time it's 5 am and you're too wired to sleep. Also, the cover is gorgeous and it's fun staring at it when you're stoned stupid.

Physical copies of the EP will be available in August, stay tuned. 

Sharkmuffin-She-Gods of Champagne Valley EP (2013)

Without getting enmired in cheap nostalgia for the '90s or some sort of "authentic" urban experience that has never existed, I'm still suspicious of recent cultural products coming from Brooklyn. Up until recently I associated Btown with the fiercer end of NYC hip-hop: Black Moon, for example. NOT garage, noise, and such. 1990s-era Brooklyn was a violent, squalid place by all accounts, but urban renewal could have benefited the original inhabitants instead of displacing them. Instead, Giuliani's stormtroopers paved the way for Bloomberg-era gentrification and the result is a tinseltown, suburbanized borough that doesn't even seem worth visiting. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out Crown Heights or Red Hook or any other neighborhood mentioned by Biggie, Gang Starr, etc. etc.

That said, Sharkmuffin's second EP is good clean fun if you dissociate it from the gentrification it's inevitably a part of, if only in a tangential way. This is high-quality trash pop falling somewhere between Vivian Girls-style rave up and Piresian Beachesque scuzz. The retarded piss take of a guitar solo at the end of "Femebot" is glorious in and of itself. A minimal 4'4 beat, yowled vocals, and trashy guitars are the end all of Sharkmuffin's sound, and as I always say, simpler is better when it comes to rock 'n roll. This isn't music you think about, it's music you simply respond to. My favored reactions to it are: dancing, drinking, and fucking. All seem appropriate responses to SM's raunch garage, so get yr ass in gear and go have some fun.

You can listen to the EP, and should then buy it, here.

Silkies-"Walk at Midnight" (2013)

Silkies is a fun band, a good band. Partly 'cause I dig their music, partly 'cause they keep dropping single songs instead of albums. That spares your humble narrator from sitting through two sides' worth of music, giving him more time to leer at Florence's fashionistas while out for a tipple. Commendable, truly commendable.

"Walk at Midnight" finds Silkies straddling the line between garage and post-punk that Grass Widow successfully bridged. Silkies' singer sorta resembles GW's vocal section, too: she has the stoic holler of a ghost passing through yr favorite bar. Dirt-simple instrumentation, insistent and repetitive vocals: where can ya go wrong? Silkies ain't reinventing the wheel, but if you dig the Supremes as much as snide, gritty garage rock, this is up yr alley.

Silkies is playin' the NYC Popfest this Saturday, June 1st. Find a significant other, take him/her to the movies and for ice cream, then take 'em to Silkies and get yr makeout on to their tunes.

Check out their tunes here. They also do a mean pisstake on Andrea Carrol!