Teenagers-demo CS (2012)

Warsaw's Teenagers blew me away with their two-song demo in December. This, consisting of those same two songs ("I want to know" and "leaving home") plus 3 new tunes, is simply rad.

I don't like to indulge in gushing about a band, but Teenagers is pretty much everything I look for in a surf pop band: short, melodic guitar lines; meaningless lyrics sung/hollered in an almost-harmonic way; and rolling drums that move like a wave.
The first two songs, "I want to know" and "leaving home" are a concise statement of Teenagers' appeal: simple and pleasureable, they're superficial in the best way possible. "All my friends are gone" almost sounds evil, prolly 'cause of the guitar tuning. "I don't care" is a put-down song in the best Nancy Sinatra tradition: dude left, fuck 'im, who cares, right? Right.

Revel in Teenagers' raditude here. Stay tuned for more info on this band, they're amazing and this demo is at the top of my list of 2012 releases (it's only January, but so what?).

*edited, 1.31.12.* Also, check out the lumberjack vibed vid for "All my friends are gone:"

Teenagers-2 song demo (2011)

Any music critic at some point has to face the arbitrariness of taste. For example, there's no essential, objective reason that I absolutely love these two songs, whereas I find Best Coast's whole catalogue offensive, and couldn't get past the schmaltzy schlock quality of Tennis' first LP.

So don't get pissy with me if you think these two songs are just more surf-garage nostalgia. They are. But there's something to them that makes Teenagers rise above the legion of bands quarrying the Phil Spector sound for all it's worth...the vocals have an open, naive quality that fits the music exactly, and the instrumentation is almost note-perfect girl-group garage: minimal guitar chords and a rollicking beat.

Teenagers is from Warsaw, a city not noted for its surf or beaches, but they've captured the California sun in musical form remarkably well here.

Winter is well upon us in the northern hemisphere, but Teenagers' demo is gonna be keeping me warm until the New Year. Check it out, here!

Siekiera-Nowa Aleksandria

One of my ex-girlfriends used to regale me with tales her mother told her about growing up outside Krakow during the 1970s. According to her, the major event of the year was on Christmas, when a truckload of oranges would be delivered to the village, one orange per person. The rest of the year it was mostly black bread and various Polish...er, delicacies....

Anyways, Zsofia [I can't type Magyar characters on this keyboard] from Piresian Beach described this to me as "panel house music." She's absolutely right-this is a slab of bleak, driving, utterly mechanized despair from behind the Iron Curtain. The Killing Joke influence is pretty clear, but Siekiera can't be reduced to a Factory Records clone for the Iron Curtain;  on some of these tracks, they come closer to the Soviet-era punk I've heard.

It's Labor Day weekend here in the States, so why don'tcha celebrate the dignity of labor with this slab 'o' wax from a time and place where the workers, theoretically, were in the driver's seat?

Further all the time. There's rumors of a re-issue, but I haven't been able to track it down online. Check this out for a thorough band bio in English.

*EDIT, 9.9.12: Reup'd the file, download HERe.
*Edit, 1.21.14: Reup'd the file again, download HERE !*