Local Release Roundup

Boxing Day 2019

Originally aired on Radical Beat Radio on Alternative Frequency (Thursday Mornings at 5am)

Car Bomb Driver 

S/T EP

Red Hawk, 2019

One of the most PG-13 songs that Car Bomb Driver has ever written is about fast food, organised religion and global attitudes to labour and consumerism.  Chick-Fil-A Is Closed On Sunday, Dave Reeder’s fantastic sandwich hunt EP opener unleashes a whole slew of topics for analyst nerds to get into.  For example, the line “nobody gets a day off in India or China” led me to learn that Chick-Fil-A’s uniquely American mix of ideologies just recently launched beyond these shores.  In October they opened a location in the English city of Reading (home of the famous festival), only to have any potential lease renewal ruled out in under a week due to pressure from gay rights groups.  [Best Withnail impression] We’ll have none of that Biblical bigotry nonsense here!  We would, however, happily allow a secular reason to keep a business closed on Sunday.  Probably a good thing that CBD (not to be mistaken with the chicken-friendly Center for Biological Diversity) never perform outside a 15 mile radius of downtown St. Pete. 

Okay, so these songs have nothing going on underneath the surface when it comes to message, except the incidental ability to mock pseudo-intellectuals like me who attempt to take a deep dive.  Oftentimes bands that harp on about the lack of serious agenda in their music are sloppy and forgettable. Not so with CBD, who have perfected the art of playing silly but not dumb with a quarter century of rhythmic punk gigging.  Not vocally aggressive enough to be hardcore, too instrumentally meaty to be considered pop, it’s a sweet spot that comes across almost as well on these 9 minutes of wax as it does watching them live. Car Bomb Dave is a brave auteur, daring to write openly of our worst instincts like the misogynist that lives inside even granola-crunching geeks on Ordinary Guy, while side B of this titleless titan is a family affair inspired by I Don’t Want To Grow Up-era Descendents, all sauce-drinking parents and shaking babies and catchy questioning of your own standards.  Rest assured though, it’s all done for the kids in the end; release label Red Hawk Records is run by local 9 year old Charlie.

 

Thanks to Dave for the copy of the record, delivered to me in the dusty guts of the Tampa Bay Times. You can buy it from Red Hawk here.

Jon Ditty & DJ Hurley 

Factory Recall

The Low Five, 2019

I’d like to dive deeper into the lyrics of Jon “Dunedin Brewery” Ditty, but work and obligations bear down at all times.  Knitted amidst the billion words printed in the sleeve of Factory Recall is the theme that Ditty is feeling much the same way on any given day.  The man’s mind is buzzing from start to finish, trying to keep a weird elongated critical eye on the big power struggle issues and the personal minutiae.  The politics slip in where they have space like a feed scan on a smoke break in an economy that never seems to pay enough or a referential retreat into the rock bands that used to bring you so much comfort (Less Than Jake, At The Drive In, Rage Against The Machine).  Junk Mail is the namesake Circle Jerks track for the digital age and just as short, corporate spam another thing we don’t have time for in any sense.  Ditty's voice is dope and there’s no time to chill.  We’ll never be able to afford “the greyest of your poupons” in this service factory of instability.  If your brain hurts from trying to follow Jon’s slapping lips focus on the lovely choruses, features from the likes of Reed Scahill and Ceschi Ramos, and the beats from DJ Hurley that are more easily appreciated on his new cut MAAT’, and great for when you need a break from working hard on the worthy and the not.

You can buy Factory Recall from Jon Ditty's website.

Reality Asylum 

Hyacinth Thrash

Self-released, 2019

I daresay that a band named after a Crass song should have known better than to announce their hiatus on UK election night, even if I am the only person in the middle of that Venn diagram of really caring about both.  Has a man not suffered enough?! It was hard to stay upset though, when the next night at their final planned gig Reality Asylum kindly gifted me their recent album Hyacinth Thrash (in a sexy orange number), and reminded why in those distant winter days of February 2018 I had described their music as “a soothing balm in the night.”  The expertly layered bleeps, beats and squeaks that the band are known for are all here, somehow soft, warm, lush, menacing and banging all at once.  Like the contrast to be found thrashing around in a field of bulbous, fragrant flowers, presumably. For all the justified bluster around what felt like wild ‘n fast Reality Asylum live performances there’s a majority of musically contemplative cuts present here, songs that poke around in your brain, whisper in your ear and lovingly slip their warm gloves around your neck.  Reality takes hold, and in a final paradox, you embrace the darkness, and all the streaks of beauty that come along for the ride.

You can stream and buy Hyacinth Thrash on Bandcamp.

Rutterkin/Piss Test/Critical Hits

Sunday, November 24th 2019

VFW Post #39, St. Petersburg FL

Published at Apathy & Exhaustion

The second Sunday Matinee at the St. Pete VFW begins with a style for Veterans of Former Waves.  Critical Hits have the shimmery ballads and power pop(py) elements of the various filaments of 1990s skinny indie, punctuated by singer Victor’s pipes that could probably be compared to many an American falsetto vocalist of the time but I’m going to go with Mark Morriss of The Bluetones for some reason.  The track News Feed does a critical hit on that Antarctigo Vespucci mark, not just in the Love in the Time of E-Mail type theme but in the warm janglies just-in-time-for-Florida-winter character.  Regarding this number, I would later see the majority of the band sitting side by side staring at their phones in an appropriate moment of melancholy.  A Guided By Voices cover takes place at an appropriate time. The band’s self-titled debut EP can be heard at the bandcamp link above.

Presumed drug lovin’ criminals Piss Test down from Gainesville boot off with something immediately reminiscent of Bad Religion’s We’re Only Gonna Die (never a bad way to go) and with the first of a series of audience member face-level kicks from front woman Deb of the kind that Greg Graffin probably hasn’t been able to do in several decades.  Such unnerving physical antics and a particular kind of vocal aggression can’t help but remind me of the now basically defunct BiteMarks (also of Gainesville), underlaid with snaky bass and proper precision drumming.  Maybe Deb’s fearful comic alias Johnny Laaw entering the building in the form of a police hat didn’t help, but the sadly-smallish matinee crowd that came here to chill before another week of selling out can only muster so much energy, leading the singer to sarcastically call for “more silence” as the set nears a close.  I’d perhaps be more inclined to go off on one if I wasn’t unacceptably sober in preparation for some theoretical future piss test. Piss poor, no pot to piss in, piss-off-prison-industrial-complex, I’m holding a piss in because I’m trying to write this review in 3 hours because time is a commodity, etc.

Rutterkin form the second sandwich half of today’s confusing Critical-Hits-melange-hybrid-band (big ups to the once again dependable multiple meal provider Uncle Mince).  The music of these Leadfoot favourites is something of a melange itself, earnest and emotional without sacrificing propulsive instrumentation, hooks and melodies, like The Ataris or the not utterly shit spots of Blink 182.  Their performance today seems to be lacking some of the raspier vocal elements of their EPs (such as the recent Sanguine).  Perhaps singer-guitarist James is in too good of a drunken mood for rasping, with a jovial gentrification rant involving various terms to the effect of “bougie, condos, integrity, John Travolta motherfuckers, fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck-knuckle!”  A full length Rutterkin album is on the way and the band will be playing again this coming Sunday at the Microgroove 8th Anniversary gig in Tampa.

This review was never finished, but is being posted for the scraps of satisfaction that it might provide. "Last edit was on November 16, 2018." Perhaps culture historians will use these unfinished insights to speculate on my writing methodology, and how it inevitably led to my dying as a penniless critic. An actual complete review can be found by our man Tony over at Apathy & Exhaustion.

Pennywise

Never Gonna Die

Epitaph, 2018

http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hypocrisy 

This link is for Jim Lindberg.  If somebody knows how to get it directly to him, do us all a favour and make sure he reads it.  Not only will it give him a litany of alternative terms for “hypocrisy” such as insincerity or casuistry, he can click the dictionary tab to make sure he actually comprehends what it means.  He wrote a really decent book once, so he should be able to manage this problem he seems to have. The entire band might contribute lyrics, but ultimately, the singer is responsible for the words he spews and any inability he might have to tell his bandmates that they are California goofballs.  Thesaurus.com: never set out to write without it.  

I come out swinging with this criticism because there isn’t a whole lot else that I dislike about Pennywise’s newest album, Never Gonna Die.  

Perhaps all his girls are now old enough (the first was born around Full Circle) to start hating his guts and he’s remembering that youthful energy much more fervently.  

Bottomed out with Reason To Believe. Kinda like the common view of the punk “explosion” itself. Seems to have come out of nowhere, but if you look closely, it built up over time.  PW have been gradually improving their game throughout the decade. Making a recovery at all is hard for most artists, and their evolution through the 90s was slow, so I think it's impressive.  It’s like the band made a ridiculously un-punk 10-year plan for getting back on top after coming to terms with the barrel of dishwater that was 2008’s Reason to Believe: record one album with a new singer, then record old songs with the old singer, then finally one of new material, and for fucks sake, take time doing it.  You can’t expect to just effortlessly dump something out like it’s 1993 and you’re still full of youthful vigour. Pennywise here have taken their craft seriously instead of phoning it in.  They have reached inside and found some of that old magic.  It sure makes those of us who have increasingly seen the band as a guilty pleasure feel vindicated for not chucking them completely out of rotation.

Not that it particularly dampened my enjoyment of you at the time, Pennywise, but thanks for doing your least impressive work when I was in the optimal punk early 20s age bracket.  Really appreciate it.

You wanted their output to mature with you. 

Highlight goodbye bad times.

The topics were never really the issue as much as the uninteresting way that they were delivered.  The key here for non wordies or less wordily inclined is that I am loving most of these grooves without checking the album sleeve.  She Said in my opinion is a bit weak, a lightly spruced up version of a mid-career song with its warbling

Buried at track 11.  Slipped in there - racists and trolls in the title track, little rioting Banksy piece on cover.

Trump. Never entirely understood the right-wing association with PW.  Their rebellious but mostly spade-is-a-spade lyrics could be interpreted by different kinds of folks, which in itself is no bad thing.  Was it because the 90s, the skate punk golden age, was also the pathetic high watermark of modern American liberalism, when Clinton was shoving through firebrand progressive policies like shitting out subsidized corn over Mexico and molesting young women?  The only thing dumber than die hard fans of the Democrats is conservatives who don't see how right wing they are. Their unwillingness to really confront this audience is evident in the both the low volume and choice of quotes here: a Trump supporter could hear them, guess that on average the band is not his biggest fan, but still not hear anything that bothers them or makes them confrontational.  Yes, Trump is slyly admitting, when he says he “loves the poorly educated,” that he is manipulating a perhaps ill-informed segment of his base. But he’s also appealing to those people, the ones given few learning opportunities, dumped on by neoliberalism and that the alter-globalization left failed to convince with decades of summit hopping.

The name refers to racism and hatred and stuff, but you know there were plenty of sneers.  “Those clowns are still around?” or “are they really trying to reference the most overused statement about the status of a genre in the history of human expression?” 

Not exactly Eminem but you can judge the political climate by how willing Pennywise is to alienate some of their hymn bros. 

Middle age, not just pretending to be young (Time bomb)

Blue album cover quality.

You can hear Never Gonna Die in full on Youtube.

Low Season
Four More Songs EP
Self-released, 2019 



If I had time to review the new Low Season EP, it would go something like this, but with far more unnecessary political sidebars and references to hip hop shoehorned in.

"If the title of this melodic masterclass doesn't exactly impress you, rest assured that St. Pete's Low Season took all the time that others bands would have spent worrying about the packaging and put it into crafting their songs. And presumably, all the time that some other bands would have put into applying layers of Misfits paint to perform numbers with titles like Melting Makeup and Lines Across My Eyes. Each track sounds different to the others and each is bound to be a blinder live. The Four More Songs EP is another testament to brevity in a sub-genre that you should really have the good sense to be sick of by now. And one of the four tracks isn't even a 47 second jingle for Adbusters Magazine masquerading as a proper song (see Devil Inside My TV from their previous offering)."

Worst Party Ever/Dollar Signs/Late Bloomer/Community Couch/Planet Loser

Sunday, January 27th 2019

Lucky You Tattoo, St. Petersburg FL

Published at Apathy & Exhaustion

About a decade.  When asked how long I’ve lived over here, I’ve now reached the point where I can comfortably round up to that answer.  Despite my gradual transformation into a hybrid accepted in full by neither culture, it doesn’t take much prompting for the old country to come screaming back into the focus of my mind.  Take for example tonight’s first orbiters of the Lucky You nebula, Tampa’s Planet Loser.  This dream pop duo is here backed by a full band, but my attention is still drawn to the Branglophile stylings of the permanent members.  Guitarist Ethan is wearing a full-on sandwich board advertisement for Scottish soft drink Irn-Bru, while vocalist Amber is dressed like she just arrived from a chilly council estate, all hooped earrings and baggy tops (much of the rest of the U.S. may have become freezingly unliveable but it’s still winter down here nevertheless).  Amusingly, it fits. Planet Loser’s rhythmic indie pop is music suited to the dark northern climes, the delicate lifting strength of three guitars and a calming female voice. Despite clothing choices, there’s much more that indicates a heartland 80s influence rather than of the decade’s tail end baggy scene; the intro to Feel You Breathe sounds like it's going to be a cover of Close To Me by The Cure.  It’s no less enjoyable to realise that it’s not.

My writing relationship with local favourites Community Couch has until now been series of near misses: arriving late to a gig they did with Piss Ghost (RIP) and Madison Turner; noting their cancellation of a September show in Richmond to push my anti-hurricane agenda; hearing an acoustic set at the first Planet Retro Punk Rock Flea Market while I sat barely out of sight attempting to flog paper manifestations of stuff like this.  I knew enough to know they’d be fun to finally witness properly though. This earworm queercore outfit channels self-doubt into community catharsis, as promised in their title.  There’s a lot of physicality for an act named after a piece of furniture you sit your arse down on; frontfolks Stove and Glen perform sustained coordinated kicks towards drummer Eli’s face during one tune, and Stove’s vicious hugging towards the end of the set encapsulates some of the emotional mixing on display in the music.  My pal Oliver jumps in at one point with a kazoo purchased from the WORST COMPANY EVER, one perfectly worthy of the Liquid Sunshine lyrics “I can't pay my bills, I don't know how we'll eat / I'd pick up another job, but then when would I sleep?”

Late Bloomer from Charlotte, North Carolina, begin their set by thanking not just our St. Petersburg, but St. Petersburg of Russia.  Careful now. The way things are going with this ever-widening conspiracy (Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard are now apparently Kremlin assets too), it won’t be long until every resident of this city is stripped of their rights under the charge of trying to build a covert Russian enclave in the middle of Florida.  As their name might suggest, Late Bloomer -- like their 6131 Records labelmates Planet Loser -- are pretty deep in the nostalgia game, but at least it’s of a high quality. As they perform their respectable post-grunge college rock I can see the washed-out MTV2 video playing inside my head.  You can see it too, because it apparently exists for the track Life Is Weird, which itself harkens backwards with clips from 1950s television.  If only we could recycle our physical resources as thoroughly as we recycle our culture.  Strangely, both Scott on drums and Neil on guitar remind me of various underappreciated Culkin siblings.   I would avoid making mention of the recently disbanded McCauley comedy vehicle The Pizza Underground, if not for the fact that the producer/engineer on Late Bloomer’s recent record Waiting was Justin Pizzoferreto (known for his work with Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.).

It goes from Life is Weird to Life Is Ruff with tonight’s other Charlotte touring band, Dollar Signs.  Life Is Ruff is a dog-friendly EP I would pick up (not to be confused with new one I Need Some Space) both because I was excited to finally see this lot and because at the time of the gig I thought I had a job on the hook and was prematurely seeing my own dollar signs.  Turns out I didn’t exactly, but other funding has thankfully since come my way.  This is a party that sucks you in.  Dollar Signs live are like The Front Bottoms plus Against Me! plus the trumpet bounce of Less Than Jake, fronted by Erik Button’s jovial inviting vocal style.  Bassist Dylan Wachman tells of a strange incident that took place 30 minutes earlier at a nearby sports bar involving a man in a peacoat and his pee, only for the stranger in question to show up and defend himself by proclaiming that “I washed my dick before I left the house.”  Inconsiderate bastard almost crashed the vocal of The Devil Wears Flannel, a great song (from last year’s This Will Haunt Me) that namechecks Orson Welles and Mozart, among others.  It’s in the same vein of lambasting popular music as I’m Better Than You by Kanye West, an old track that brought Dollar Signs to my attention years before West started donning his MAGA hat and talking a lot of foolishness.

Being that it’s an all-ages, booze-free, essjaydubbleyoo sort of hang out, youthful vigour is often present here at Lucky You Tattoo.  But in the case of Sarasota’s emo-ists Worst Party Ever a significant subset of the crowd are constantly pogoing around the singer with an otherworldly level of enthusiasm.  I was waiting for him and his mic stand to hit the floor amidst all the excited attention and the music to come to an abrupt pause.  Worst Party Ever may or may not be styled after the dialect of Comic Book Guy, a nerd so insignificant that Matt Groening didn’t even give him a name, but their apparent popularity and riled-up base would probably net them more votes than some of the other 3rd parties out there.  The music inspiring such a reaction is much more energetic than their Dashboardy bandcamp offerings might prepare you for. Cries of “four more years!” are met with the response “what the fuck is that?,” suggesting maybe that the political wing of the Worst Party Ever empire hasn’t yet been discussed.  A word of advice: make a few well placed calls to the Russian embassy and Ye and you’ll apparently be unstoppable.

Leftöver Crack

Leftöver Leftöver Crack: The E-Sides and F-Sides

Fat Wreck, 2018

Published at Apathy & Exhaustion

Here's my latent, superficially non-denominational holiday gift to all punks, skins, outsiders, and those who feel in general that humanity is driving itself into the abyss.  The Mariah Carey staple, All I Want For Christmas Is You -- a song so popular that 24 years after its release it just became the new single day streams record holder on Spotify -- is a subversive message of anti-consumerism.  “I don't care about the presents underneath the Christmas tree,” playing in every retail shithole in the West and probably beyond.  You are now allowed to admit that you like it without shame. You're welcome.

If it’s good enough for Mariah, it’s good enough for the Leftöver Cracks of our world.  It’s not necessarily the coolest thing to admit or a major indulgence, but I occasionally enjoy some Crack and company.  With a planet so obviously being fucked from every direction, we need a vast variety of mental medicines. We need deep analysis, daring artistic vision, boring data-driven reporting.  We also need simple messages that are easily understood, gut-based, emotional outbursts, the normal language of proper people. The Crackers fall somewhere along this spectrum, though it’s tough to say exactly where.  Their subject matter and positions are often pretty far outside the mainstream, somewhat radical even for the punk sphere. It’s also quite easy to see a juvenile or shallow aesthetic going on, of the kind that causes critics to refer to them as “music aimed at Garbage Pail Kids,” or “that awful fucking band . . . whose particular din is enjoyed by nobody with good taste in punk rock ever.  EVER.”

Point is, it’s tempting to indulge in what might be considered basic skin deep revolt sometimes.  Take for example the little number Baby-Punchers featured on this rarities collection that I am apparently reviewing.  What could be more satisfying than the opening line “Fuck your flag and fuck your face” when you’ve just had a run in with your dumbass neighbours, complaining that foreigners don’t care about “old glory” in front of you, then trying to imply that you’re somehow less foreign than other immigrants, as happened to me yesterday?  It’s almost as if growing up in England makes me more inclined to stick by my South Asian fellow complex dwellers.  The track (originally released on a 2006 split with Citizen Fish) features Jello Biafra bringing another welcome element to the already varied mix in a shouted word rant, and when it yell-culminates in “QUIT YOUR JOBS!  BURN DOWN THE MALLS!” you goddamn want to!  I will indulge those impulses for these few minutes if only strategically or metaphorically in my wider life (considering that the other thing I intended to do today was apply for some sort of rent-paying toil... that didn’t happen).  And as for the song Banned in P.C, I wish!  They just asked me in for another one-off shift, the merciless bastards.

Leftöver Leftöver Crack has been carefully and meticulously curated with the goal of coming across like an unattractive document of scum living, burned inattentively to stolen CDs by an anonymous compiler in between smack injections and nutting coppers.  You don’t believe it of course, but whatever. This appeal has always been in the actual music anyway, Stzas vocals generally seeming to suffer from some combination of proudly rough recording equipment and gargling too much cider and lean.  You could choose to interpret this all as “slum tourism” or “lifestyle anarchism” I suppose, or an attempt to artistically capture certain elements of life under this soul-sucking regimen; without intimate knowledge of the band members’ lives it’s mere guesswork.

Spanning their career as it does, E-Sides and F-Sides manages to round up a lot of the unusual stuff Leftöver Crack have often inserted into their works.  The number of vocal samples and skits present from the Rock the 40oz EP indicate Stza and co’s respect for hip hop mixtape creativity; I thought E-side might mean East Side until I realised it’s just a reference to the fact that this is a double LP.  (Interestingly, the long running website punknews.org did a similar mixtape idea last year called Banned From The P.C., that features a BBC live version of Gay Rude Boys Unite.)  There’s the wild west criminality meets Bad Brains of The Good, The Bad and the LöC, while World War 4, originally from an old Fat Wreck Christmas album, has some unexpected pop punk melody and background vocals.  There’s a really quite fun cover of Men At Work’s Land Down Under that I think even haters might enjoy, even if it is largely because it features somebody else's lyrics.

If you’re a serious fan of leftovers, ready to lazily consume them when you get home from another day working for The Man, you’ll find this either a cool single package to have or pretty much a waste of time, since the majority of the material comes straight from the bands’ various splits and EPs.  If you’re more a casual listener like me thirty tracks isn’t bad value for cuts that you may have overlooked. I would suggest checking the bandcamp tracklist to see where it puts you on this spectrum. Right, now that that’s sorted, what to do now? Back to Apple Pie and the Police State I guess.

https://leftover-crack.bandcamp.com/album/left-ver-left-ver-crack-the-e-sides-and-f-sides

Leftöver Leftöver Crack: The E-Sides and F-Sides can be heard at the bandcamp link above, and can be purchased (if you’re that unpunk) from Fat Wreck at this link.  It’s available as a digital download, on CD or a double LP.