Vaguess-s/t LP (2013)

If you hate Vaguess, you're a stupid asshole who hates rock 'n' roll. Yeah, that's right kiddies, the Drug Punk is back 'n' decked in black 'n' as full of spite as ever. If I've ever steered you wrong it's out of a sense of duty not duplicity and I do what I can to review everything that crosses my desk so if a record sucks, the following blurb is at least done in earnest (on my part, anyways)....

....anyway, you know yr gonna love it if a band's name is Vaguess.  Vaguess trafficks in surf slop garage blasts of genius, laying the nostalgia on heavy, quite like the much-beloved Hunx 'n' His Punx.* Sloppy, almost-4'4'-time-rhythm section, a singer who sounds like he took two too many Valium before appearing at the studio, and a guitarist who can't decide if he's Kurt Cobain or (Germs-era) Pat Smear. Fucking righteous. The fact that the singer sounds sorta (a lot) like Keith Morris or Mike Ness just makes these tunes a thousand times better.

A more sober reviewer would go into these songs individually, analyzing and dissecting, but that just ain't my way. I'm too faded on bad beer and bad pills to do anything more competent than this heer review. All I can say is that, if you've been paying attention this long (God bless), yr gonna love this garage gloop.

GET STOOPID GET SMART THEN GET CONSUMERIST. You know what I mean.

*If you don't love Hunx 'n' His Punx, then you probably hate things like love and sex too. I saw these fuckerz in Portland awhile ago 'n' dude was asking for tips so he could afford to go to the gay strip club down the street. Righteous. Vaguess is pretty cool too.

Whirr-Pipe Dreams LP (2012)

Sacramento's hometown heroes dropped one of last year's best LPs, and I completely missed it. Since I got back it's all I've been listening to. Along with Broken Water and Psychic Blood, Whirr is one of the only bands worth a damn, as far as the '90s-revival thing goes. Instead of simply crushing you to death with colossal Mascis-style riffs or drowning you in MBV tone, Whirr seduces you. Effects-laden guitar dreamworks and sedate synthesizer lines waft in and out of focus through, perpetuating the initial impression I had of Whirr: they sound like falling in love feels.

I'm too out of it right now to elaborate on that, so just go ahead and check it out for yourself. Then go buy a copy at Tee Pee Records!

*EDIT, 9.9.14: I re'up'd the file, you can get Pipe Dreams HERE! *

Alone & Forsaken XVII: Home is Where....

"I've traveled. Everywhere you go, it's the same. The water tastes weird, the food tastes weird. You get sick. And then, when you get back...you can't figure out if it happened to you, or to somebody else"-character in Slackers

In fact I enjoy traveling, but sometimes it feels like you leave pieces of yourself in a place if you stay there too long. Anyway, here's the latest installment in my mix series. The songs just sorta feel like going home during summertime, for me, anyways.

I probably won't be posting much for the next week; go out and get a tan, get drunk and get laid instead of downloadin' music, kiddies.

...home is where we hide 

1. Songs:Ohia-Farewell Transmission
2. Heavy Times-Sunside
3. Husker Du-Celebrated Summer
4. Pink Reason-Storming Heaven
5. Electrelane-To the East
6. Beach House-Used to Be
7. Dead Moon-Don't Look Back
8. Tom Waits-Downtown train
9. Joe Strummer-Let the Good Times Roll
10. Kitchen's Floor-116 (Live at Real Bad version)
11. The Mountain Goats-Distant Stations
12. Broken Water-Kamilche House

Teenagers-Demo II (2013)

Teenagers wowed me pretty hard with their first demo, back in 2012. I still stand my by original, drunken assertion that it was one of the best albums of its kind last year. Crisp, clean, hyper-melodic garage about love, love and...love. I had them pegged as falling somewhere on the Beach Boys side of the Beach Boys/Troggs split as far as neo-60s pop goes. You know the difference: music you can play in the car with your parents when you're home for the holidays, vs. ugly, nasty, lewd tunes about premature ejaculation.

Well, on their second demo, Teenagers seem to be hopping the fence and sliding into the slime of the Troggs' turf. The basic sound is still the same: dirt-simple guitar lines, stutter-putter bum drums, a singer who's perfected the art of the "I'm so elegantly wasted I just don't give a damn" voice. But the band has popped a few pills, maybe had a few bad one night stands, and gotten dirtier, muddier. The guitar is fuzzier, and the mix overall got dragged through a few backalleys and dive bars before winding up on bandcamp. "Sick and Tired," the demo's closer, is their best tune yet: a riff nasty and heavy enough that they mighta stolen from The Gits.

Hopefully Teenagers will record a proper EP or LP soon and the great mystery of whether they're Troggs fans or Beach Boys fans will be clarified. In the meantime, check out this demo.

Peopling-Bulbout EP (2013)

Following a familiar course for noisemakers over the years, Peopling's second EP finds Ronnie progressing a bit from his debut: after all, most of us have trouble listening to pure noise for sustained periods, let alone making a career out of it. Whereas that was 9 parts all-out, aural assault to 1 part beat, Bulbout has adjusted the ratio more towards 6:4. There's still plenty of noise fuckery, especially on "Bulbouts in Bloom." But even that has a discernible, if patchy, beat fighting valiantly with the aural fuzz for room on the mix. The opener, "My Glitchy Kelly Roland," sorta reminds me of Pere Ubu's "Laughing." There's the same tension present, between the puerile desire to offend and a more measured attempt at making a collage out of different found sounds. Not bad for a 3-song sophomore effort, indeed.

Check out "Bulbout," and BUY IT, here.

Royal Headache-July 2010 Tour CS (2010)

Well, if you haven't heard of Royal Headache by now you probably hate rock 'n' roll, and may also have no soul. Civilians (i.e. the rest of the world) have gotten real into these guys in the last two years, and I wish 'em all the best. This 2010 set, recorded on tour in Newcastle and Brisbane, contains 6 tracks that would make it onto the self-titled 2011 LP and one that didn't, "Little Star."

It opens with a scratchy, infectious guitar riff before the band blasts into its trademark sound: sharp, snazzy punk with Australia's answer to O.V. Wright on vocals. I wish they included it on the LP, since it's as passionate and frantic as every other song I've heard by RH. The rest of the set rushes by, with some of Shogun's witty repartee v. hecklers: the songs aren't as polished as they are on the LP, but they sound just as good blurry as they did with slick(er) production. The recording quality isn't all that clear, but it's still pretty damn good for a basement or bar show.

Basically, if you love Royal Headache, this will tide you over until they drop a new record. I hope that's very soon, since my friends are getting tired of me hyping this band.

"I know that you don't want me, baby...." The tape is long out of print, but the band just re-pressed the LP, so go buy that from them at bandcamp or via their own website.  In full disclosure, I stole this one from I Am the Least Machiavellian blog, which you should be following if you aren't already.

Lowtronik: Cuts, Edits, Versions LP (2013)

I was gonna review this album sober, but then I got in an argument with one of my best friends about the evils (joys) of drugs. Out of pure nihilistic spite towards my well-intentioned friend, however, I popped 2 Xanax and drank a bottle of red wine before spinning this. So let's see how far I can get before passing out in a pool of wine and my own drool....

Turns out it was a good decision, since down-tempo electronica* is perfect for sitting still and watching the world go about its business while taking no part in it. This is a compilation of several years' worth of odds and ends from Lowtronik, a fixture of the indie electro scene in Greece.** I'm told that it's trip-hop, whatever that is.  It's pretty much perfect for a lazy summer afternoon when it's too hot to go out and you just wanna chainsmoke and drink gin 'n' tonics. 

The album starts with "Interlude 128," which could be a Deathgrips outtake, minus the annoyingly shrill rapping. Most of these tracks are so chilled out they're almost catatonic, the exception being "Hungry." The taut, massive beat is mixed all the way forward and stomps all over yr eardrums. My favorite cut is "Weekend Mellotron." The vocals are mixed a bit too high, but the beat is expansive and breezy, complemented perfectly by clusters of synthesizer notes. It feels like a complete track Lowtronik would play in the club, instead of a sketch he's still editing and trimming. 

Reality is starting to turn into a blurry gray splotch as I finish up this review, and "in a slow (tempo)," the LP's closer, is just right for a head full of pills and a stomach full of wine. Before I pass out, I'll encourage you to check this thing out, even if you don't dig electronic music, typically (I'm assuming that's most of my regular readership). 

You can listen to the LP and download it for free at here. Physical copies will be available soon from DNA Records. Lowtronik has his own website, too. 

 *I don't know a thing about musical terminology, let alone electronic music, so for my purposes "down tempo" means what you'd listen to at the end of the night, instead of what's playing while you're huffing coke and dancing (is that what people do at clubs?). 

**With due apologies to denizens of Thessaloniki and Patras, I assume that mostly means Athens.

The Chewers-Chuckle Change and Also LP (2011)

Most of the bands I review for Drug Punk wear their influences on their sleeves. Many of these bands also describe themselves as "weird" and "freaked out" in the emails they send me, or in their bandcamp pages. Very few of these bands come anywhere close to being as good as their influences, and almost none of them are truly weird. What do I mean by "weird," you ask, in an age when lawyers can go to work with red hair and any jerkoff can go from The Beatles to Pink Reason in an hour's worth of surfing the web, without having any sense of why the latter is so great and the former are, well, trite?*

For me, "weird" usually implies a refusal. A refusal to simply rip off your favorite bands, a refusal to go along with whatever stupid revival is current. And a refusal to apologize for this. The Chewers aren't radically new, but they are absolutely weird. This LP, twenty-two tracks of improvised curiosities and experiments, is clearly and unabashedly indebted to the Captain. Of course, Captain Beefheart is one of those bands we all claim to love, and most of you reading this probably have Trout Mask Replica safely tucked away in a zip file somewhere next to the porn on your laptop. But how much do you in fact listen to Captain Beefheart, for fun? And who have you heard, lately or ever, that actually sounds as fucked up and out of vogue as Captain Beefheart must have back in the late '60s?

No one, that's who. This isn't noise, this isn't neo-grunge, this isn't noisepunk, this is just a bunched of isolated goofballs doing their thing and I doubt they're all that interested in getting interviewed by Pitchfork or whatever bigdealsowhat blog. Either that, or they've done an amazing job acting like they just don't give a fuck about popularity.

Usually, 22 tracks would simply put me to sleep because of the sheer volume. But not only did I listen to all 22 of these songs, but most of them are good. Really good. They have a family resemblance, but don't really sound the same and this doesn't end up sounding like a simple Beefheart tribute. The first ten tracks are mostly sketchy, off-the-cuff improv scribblescrable. The Chewers really find their stride on "Smiling Samuel," a lilting, off-kilter tune that, i think, tells the tale of Smiling Samuel. It sounds like each member of the band started the song a few seconds apart from each other, and they're not particularly interested in sync'ing up. It's easily the funniest song I've heard this year. From there on it's pure pleasure listening to the Chewers throw together sounds that sort of gel into songs, in the way that a collage vaguely becomes a separate whole after you've finished cutting and pasting bits of newspaper and magazines together.

Instead of continuing to prattle, I'll simply urge you to check out The Chewers.



*Yeah, that's right. Fuck the Beatles. Rock coulda been anything before they dumped Sgt. Pepper on us, and they single-handedly set rock back a decade with all that faux-eastern, wanna-be spiritualist crap.

The Janitors-Drone Head 2X LP (2013)

Swagger is acrucial element in all blues-based rock 'n' roll. Simply put: Can you do justice to the Son House and Blind Willie McTell riffs at the base of your sound, no matter how many effects pedals you got? Or are you hiding behind these effect pedals 'cause there's nothing worthwhile behind the distortion? Nick Cave brought this sort of bravismo to new heights with his pre-Boatman's Call work. Unfortunately, swagger and unabashedly macho posturing has gone the way of the dodo of late. Of course, nine times out of ten, macho posturing is boring at best, repulsive at worst: think of hair metal. But when done right, as an organic component of the music instead of as idiotic chest-thumping, it's a good thing.

The Janitors and San Francisco's The Chaw are two of the only contemporary bands that can pull it off. Along with Annesley's much-missed Meat Thump, these bands' heavy, sleazy vibe is perfect for sordid living of all sorts. The Janitors and The Chaw are similar in another sense: both have a heavily cinematic quality that fills out their rock 'n' roll core, and makes it more compelling after repeated listening.

Listening to the Janitors' debut LP, this cinematic feeling runs straight through the two EPs and several new tracks found therein. Heavy guitars and a prominent rhythym section are key components to their sound, but the organ and killer production create an entire world you can lose yourself in. It's a ballsy move for your vinyl debut to consist in large part of previously-released material, but the Janitors' debut EPs fit together into a whole, much like the individual bricks make up the bar you like to pass out behind, after a long bender.

"Strap Me Down" sticks in my head after repeated listening. Agonizingly, mesmerizingly slow guitar stomp; menacing organs that swirl in and out of focus; and muttered, then howled vocals that are an indecipherable but essential part of the vicious grey stew the Janitors specialize in. "A-Bow," however, is the LP's cornerstone. Clocking in at 12:29, it sums up everything fun in the Janitors' sound. The first five minutes sound like a Morricone out-take, straddling the line between spaced out rock and spaghetti western majesty. The tension finally explodes around 5:30 into heavy, drawn out classic rock riffing with enough organs to keep monotony at bay. "A-Bow" is
a glorious, and gloriously ambitious, piece of blues stomp with more depth and space than most music in this tradition.

Basically, the Janitors are what would happen if the White Stripes were as good as you always wanted them to be: innovative instead of simply adept; lewd instead of gentlemanly; and, ultimately, more interested in worming their way into your brain than in temporary aural fireworks. This is slow-burn scuzz rock with a vengeance.

Check it out here. The vinyl drops July 15th, complete with a gatefold sleeve perfect for staring at when blasted on speed and acid. You can pre-order your copy from Cardinal Fuzz Records.