True Sons of Thunder - Stop and Smell Your Face

The second album of gritty garage sludge from punk alleystars True Sons of Thunder. Dirty rock excavated from long graves of noise, shaking off the mud and roar, stomping through simple rockers with a babble of disharmony pulled in its wake, Dead Moon by way of Flipper's deep junk racket. There's the hanging punch and tumble of Don't Make It Stop, the twitching horrorpunk of Death Walks Behind You crackling with tension and panic, the belting KBD snot of These Days, a perfect rudimentary desperate punk grunt. There's the slower detours into the noiserock grumble of Glass Foot, marching through battering storms of feedback, dying in the din, the plodding deathblues of Mother May I Now Spell Cup, which comes like the degraded radiosignals of two stations cutting in over one other, melding and splintering.

Friends of Mine starts sung-spoken over simple gutsy riff, blowing into a big openfield 80s rock chorus, "JOSIE KNOWS SHE'S GONNA COME AROUND/ALL THE BOYS ARE GONNA SCREAM AND SHOUT/I KNOW SHE WANTS A PIECE OF ME/I KNOW THAT'S HOW IT'S GONNA BE" before falling back into the shaking repetition of the riff, the fiery clang of the noise. Gettin Kind of Cocky loses it totally in the scream and this odd plinky-plonk solo that clinks over the top of the chaotic squeal and drive.

Each song has its own take on some aspect of the garagepunk artifact mentality, scrabbling around in the twentieth century's dirty cupboards for those little lost bits of bent human swing, trawling through record bins, soulseek files, mp3 blogs, for the obliterated 80s hardcore demos, the privatepress inept blues messes, the 60s beat abominations, all those stabs at musical expression living more with the distortion and degradation and . From the simplistic rock and roll of Get on the Bus, shimmying with blasé fuck-it sneer "GET ON THE BUS AND GO HOME/GET ON THE BUS AND LET'S SPLIT", Beluga's animal inanity amongst the crash and blare "BELUGA! IT'S A WHALE! A WHITE WHALE! DO THE BELUGA!", offering no clues to what this dance entails, but exhorting listeners to get down to it nonetheless, it sounds like a bedraggled forgotten novelty from a dead scene, dancehalls torn down, memories dimmed. Like the Oblivians album from last year it displays familiarity with all sorts of oddball shouts, but it's far nastier, far more crummied-up, it's garagepunk that got lost in the garage, amongst the enginefilth and oily rags and black stains.

On Little Big Chief records.