Perfume River - No Wind flexi

Wrestling the title of most ill-fitting bandname away from previous champions God Equals Genocide, who play pop-punk not epic crustcore like what you would think, Perfume River play unrelenting d-beat, not acoustic pop songs about feeling and other things that suck. Unrelenting apart from the fact that every song lasts 45 seconds or less. Released on CS in 2012, I think, getting the vinyl treatment from Symphony Of Destruction this year on a gorgeous clear flexi with silver detailing. Harsh world screams. "REPULSION!" roars Ammoniated & Lifeless. "THOSE WHO LIVE/LIVE OFF THE DEAD" A Continuation bellows through the brutish noise, repetitions, repetitions.  A repellent two minutes of human hate that turns over like a bomber engine. The wardeath noisefuck with the energy of airraid panic.

Menem - Neoliberalismo

Silly sounding Argentinian snot. Carlos Menem was an Argentinian politician who was president from 89 to 99 and looked like the sort of light-entertainment host your grandmother would carry a torch for, so I guess this band is named in the tradition of Thatcher on Acid, Andrew Jackson Jihad or George Moshington. Opens on a mid-tempo punk stomper La La La that's about wanting to fuck that revs up into a classic dumb tossed-off punk song half way through. La Policia features that classic punk trick of incorporating a cop siren into it's 47 second, except rather than a genuine sound sample it's just someone from the band shouting "NEE-NAW! NEE-NAW! NEE-NAW!" which is pretty fucking great and kinda sums up this record. Nothing particularly new, but punk done with enough goofy energy that you can't help but have fun, even if you don't speak any Spanish. Hardcore songs, less thrashy stuff, 25-odd mostly minute-long songs all packed with sneering/slurred vocals that bounce off each other and sound like a taunt even when you don't know what they're saying, from the scream and pogo bounce of Mordo or Fideos Con Pure and its echoes of Sloppy Seconds' Lois Lane to the infectiously poppy guitar lines of Steven Seagal to the slipshod Oi! of Wacha Embrollera.

Globsters - Rock and Roll Misery

The intro track is just dancing fiddles, like this is gonna be a Neck or DKM album or something, but nah, this is way deeper weirder shit, and the way the noise rises like a rocket rumble at the end sets the scene for this glorious burst of freeing punk attitude, bouncing from a fuzzy poppy garage-punk thrum to a powerviolence killer and back again. This is a fantastic from a BTMI!-style one man + band where Adam Brewer drags in whoever he can into this little punk universe, making a statement of intent by not intending to make statements, just thrashing in whichever way he feels like on a particular day, screaming with bedlam anguish on Rock and Roll Misery, sneering goofily on Roll You Up and Smoke You, warbling through badtape distortion on Ultimate Beefcake, obliterating the subgenre borderlines, bringing it all together in one melting pot of punk, noise and United Mutation chaos, buzz and song, flail and threat, dirt and Ramones.

Toys That Kill - Fambly 42

Todd Congelliere has been working this vein for a long goddamn time. Fractious pop-punk anthems, that never feel clean while never escaping their inherent irresistible catchiness, and while they may tilt at other genres, Abort Me Mother Earth getting some stop-start Devo feel into its apocalyptic nihilism, Stye opening with a nighttime country sway, they always pull it back to that Fuck Yeah Pop-punk, but behind the hooks, it's a pretty bummed out album, painting pictures of dysfunction on Fambly, stuck in the sulk on I Don't Wanna Be Around, attacking  the notion of positive thinking on I've Been Stabbed calling "Tried to laugh, tried to sing, tried to get along but I dunno this song, I don't know it", closing with the bluegrass-inflected Clap for Alaska that builds up with romantic ballad lines and then blows back into the TTK-sound for the escape and and its convincing repetition of "I know if I come back down they're gonna get me". That's the most that can be offered on this album, not redemption, just recognition of the places we can't go, the places we can't be, the times we're stuck in and hate, snatched out of the air and crammed into this particular Todd C style of punk rock which has been two decades in the making.

Culture Kids - Culture Kids

Culture Kids - s/t

Culture Kids have a song called Die Nazi Scum and if that's not enough to convince you to check it out then I'm really not sure what you're doing hanging round these parts of town. The album starts with a brief couple seconds of garage-jangle which trick you into thinking it's gonna be a sloppy Spaceshits shake, but then the angry snot of early 80s style skatepunk snaps in. Emaciated hardcore punk which scratches and barks over the undercurrent of that aforementioned garage shiver, that writhes with nihilistic snarl on songs with such cutting titles as like The Ritual of Misdirected Energy and Headless Body in a Topless Bar.

Cobra - Tokyo Boicott

OI! OI! Motherfucker! Oi! I dunno know what to say about this beyond: it's an Oi! album. Snotty slurred streetpunk vocals than go into titanic shoutalong choruses that crash down upon you like a quiver of fury rolling through a crowd, chug-a-lug pubrock riffs, Oi!-based puns, everything a good Oi! album should have. It's even got a couple chill moments, in the manner of Cock Sparrer's Out On an Island, like the whistling on Get On The Ship. The music you sing with your friends as you all peg it down alleyways as the cops show up to the rumble. A band that have been going for 30 years and 12 albums and still have songs called Teenage Riot.

Mind Spiders - Meltdown

The Mind Spiders totally nail that trick Jay Reatard perfected on songs like You Mean Nothing To Me of adding a spacey screwball quiver and quake to some infectious power-pop, so yeah the song sparkles and dances like a Tranzmitors number but it also needles at you with an uncomfortable morose edge. Adding bits of new wave whatevers to the particular punk style he perfected with The Marked Men, Mark Ryan makes an album which can pick you up and have you dancing on pop-punk like Play You Out, sweep over you with some whisper-synth blues on More Than You, combining those two sensations on stuff like Wait For Us where the Dirtnap punk runs its wiry game and the keyboards warble and wail in the background as the song rises and degrades, losing structural integrity as it tries to escape its earthbound despondent parts, before slipping into the uncomfortable drone, nag, and noise of the title track closer's pop take on an Exithippies abrasion ambience futurefuck.

Slices - Still Cruising

The follow-up to last year's Cruising. Slices still make nasty hardcore punk, still unafraid of chucking in interstitial weirdness between the bilious blasts of aggression to amp up the ominous atmosphere they cultivate. This one feels slightly more rock and roll than the last album though, especially on stuff like Slices Like Dirt which edge close to a shuddering hardcore perversion of that tumbledown garage-punk style of something like the Okmoniks' Party Fever. They've got an offkilter noiserock touch on mid-tempo malleations like Why Do You Make Yourself So Sad and All My Life and they close on absolute stormer in Mustard which unless I'm missing some sort of metaphor, is about freaking the hellfuck out over a sandwich, in a gratifyingly goofy childish "ALL I WANTED WAS A PEPSI!" kinda rage. "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!? A PIECE OF BREAD!? IS THIS MY LUNCH!?"

Swearin' - Swearin'

Gritty pop-punk with sweet indie crunch. Spinning and slipping on the borderline between those sort of punkish indie-poppers like Superchunk and the folk-infused punk spit of the likes of The Motorcycle Industry or Mary Prankster, but with a bit more thickness to the sound than the spindly licks of those bands, with the rattle of the guitar and rhythm threatening to bury the vocals sometimes. Swearin' provide some chilled-out songs like Empty Head that obviously bring to mind the crackle-folk of fellow post-PS Eliot music Waxahatchee, then there's something like Divine Mimosa where that mournfulness struggles with the dirty burble of the bass. These slower quieter songs are diverting counterpoints to the sandpaper-pop runarounds that make this record really steam. The catchy punk explosions of Crashing, Kill Em With Kindness and Here to Hear that stamp their feet and blow through you like returning fragments of blackout memory, and the beautiful Movie Star which closes the album, with its rolling mid-tempo indie-punk and the drop-outs which take the album down to its most melancholic mutterings before driving up into the noise.

Atentado - Dias De Rabia

Crusty obsfucatory torturedin. Animal growls and a bombination of fuzzknackered evil guitarmurk. Creepy and unsettling in the best way, slamming home in a cacophonous onslaught mid-to-up-tempo relentless d-blast terror, like a punk dispatch from Event Horizon's hell-dimension, swirling with needling noise on Militares, hints of rock and roll tug on Nunca Voleran, vomiting spite and anguish and hardcore despair.

Anasazi - s/t 7"

Shivers of the gothpunk ache of T.N.T.'s - Manifesto Guernika, punk laced with dark, unsettling, sweeping sounds, that gets weirder and dronier over the course of these three songs. Starting with a clear sharp punk slice on Bone Collector that cuts like an early Damned slasher, running into the spacey intro of Samsara which, when the song begins earnest that has that taut rising menace of Killing Joke struggling in the blowy surf and wind clamour of a Frankenchrist soundscape. The final track, Loving You, stretches all those things further, the drone, the threat, portentous black choral whoa-ohs, ghostnoise, urban decay gauntness with weirdo intonations like dark prayers, hollow laughter. Anasazi: a convincing post-punk evil.

Red Dons - Ausländer

On the title track Red Dons strike on of those sweet punk rhythms that can keep a song chugging for what feels like forever (well, like five minutes, that's forever in a punk context) without losing any of its insistent struggle and nerve, like Adolescents' Kids of the Black Hole, Screeching Weasel's Edge of World, Jim Carroll's People Who Died or New Bomb Turks' Bad for Me. Ausländer, and to a lesser extent the b-side, are the sort of anthemic/melodic rise-and-fall punk hypnotics that have you playing them like fifteen times in a row as they dig right into the hurt and click of your bones until the end of the song feels like a miniature cataclysm and you've just got to hit it again, a leavin' home road-weary yearning played out with punk barbs, Cock Sparrer-wistful tinges, the sweep and size of a smoothed-down Manix singalong.

Solid Attitude - BB Gun Picnic

Solid Attitude have got a rock and roll punch, a thumping Sonics base for slippery Doc Corbin Dart vocals strained to the point of slathering spangled discomfort to yelp over and lacerate sneeringly. Garage rumble to shake the dust from the ceiling, the cobwebs from your leather jacket, strip the paint from the walls with the 27 second combusting thrash on Punk Beer, the post-punk quiver on Smoking Sheets, the anxious snap and scream of Can't Chill Out, the Stones-y drone on Black Pocket climbing into a torrent of fumepunk strut and roll.

World's Scariest Police Chases - Unfuckwithable

Hawaii '77. Supersuckers Super Troopers. Obnoxious Bad Lieutenant-channeling punk rock, the Herzog Bad Lieutenant where it's all about glorious unrepentant pill-gobbling chaos in a badge, twitching and tearing about the city without conscience or consequence, not the Abel Ferrara one where it's all about feeling bad that you got a blowjob while thinking about the pope. Such shoutalong authority as hasn't been thrown out since the glory days of scene rule-rockers Crucial Youth. World's Scariest Police Chases are the breezeblock blunt satire of DK's Police Truck tied to the the big mouth daft noisy repugnance of Copstabber and dynamic Candy Snatchers degradation. Put Your Hands Up pulling together the party-time chant and the gunpoint police order, screaming on Rolemodels "LIVE MY LIFE LIKE A LOADED GUN!" as in, something you don't really want in the house.

Post Teens - The Heat

This band is made up of members of sludge-poppers Torche, shoegazers Averkiou and PV thrashers Assholeparade, all coming together to make a release that sounds nothing like any of that, instead its six sixty second songs of poppy garage-punk, combining the relentless rip of a Marked Men laceration with the scuzzy noise of the likes of CPC Gangbangs, bringing to mind at times the straighter Fleshies moments, laid through with little irresistible flourishes like the burst of Bad Brain cadence that opens Turn Down the Teen Rebellion, or the miniature freakout that closes Polyamory.

Reivers - Sympathetic Shock

Pummeling political punk rock from Oakland. Corrosive female vocals over crusty monument-shaking hardcore, the opener Lurching doing just that, as it launches upwards and outwards from the squeaking and stumbling base and into this unrelenting bonebreaking ripper. Whether it stutters and chugs like One Last Shot or Brokered Lives, pierces like Birthright or just straight up unleashes like unholy fissure of Painted In The Corner, this is scorch-the-earth bitter disquiet, roaring with contempt for the world and its ills.

Ilegal - El Aire Libre Fuera De Los Dientes Del Monstruo Tirano Y Canibal

Clattering mid-80s-influenced hispanophone punk rock. El Aire Libre Fuera De Los Dientes Del Monstruo Tirano Y Canibal roughly translates The Air Outside of the Teeth of Mostrous Tyrant Cannibal, which gives some hint at the anger and minatory brilliance of this record. Socio-political hardcore that squeals and writhes with a potent restlessness, urging ever onwards. It slows to grinds and trudges on Emigrando before building up into a furious Criaturas-style wailing guitar solo. It hits with straight-up burn on Intentalo. It explodes with stop-start machine-drums on Sin Alternativas. Hermoso Lugar constructs a mini-epic of planetary destruction starting that punctuates its hardcore attacks with unsettling spiky fills and  builds everything on that twin menace of the relentless drums and the guitars stretching, aching with threat and danger, twisting into nasty squalls of noise. Planeta Muerto flames itself out into a plateau of grumbling feedback and then bursts back in with some terse White Lung-style guitars and rumbling crusty bass. Ilegal are a Canadian band, they sing in Spanish, recorded this in French-Canada and Germany, released it on a British label, pitch-perfect global hardcore ready to burn the world with petrolbomb riffs and liberated cannon drums, anarcho without the cartoon, capable of anything. Autodestructivos ends the album, documenting the self-destruction of individuals burnt by the struggle, crushed by the shit, without moralising or glorifying, over the same peak-and-trough punk thrum that the whole album is built on, fading out then storming back in, speeding up to a furious thrash then crashing into a mid-tempo buzz before rolling out into a slow empty fade-to-black.

Displague - Displague

It's a band called Displague. I do like the way 'dis' bands have begun to exhaust that prefix in terms of actually badass sounding fuck-you punk words and now just clank it onto any appropriately violent apocalyptic morpheme they can find, DISPLAGUE! DISHAMMER! DISGOD! DISFUSE! Displague come from Spain offer a classic big-ass neocrust barrage following on from the likes of similar soaring Spanish rippers Derrota and Ekkaia. Bass like tree trunks, d-beat flurries, this sears and crushes like a motherfucker on straight hang-on-tight-don't-look-down sky-stormers like Mort and Marionetas, but then also has the doomierneocrust breaks on the likes of Complejo de Inferioridad and La Obediencia al Consumo where it drops down into the murk and sewer stagger to really revel in the hateful gloomy atmosphere before it screams back into that armageddon thrash, pouring vasts acres of burn and tempest into the huge sour punk rumble of crust band in full fucking throttle, bass to open tombs, guitars that eat bricks and laugh, drumbeats that tear like steroid hearts.

Puffy Areolas - 1982: Dishonourable Discharge

Despite the presence of both the words '1982' and 'discharge', this is not another album of straight UK82 worship, instead its a meatier, more unsettling piece of work. It starts with 1982, a straight hardcore-punk number, that lasts about a minute forty that barely holds itself together for that brief length under the attack of a psychey freakout that threatens to suck the song into its swirling vortex throughout. The song succumbs to that weird noise and it's that struggle which defines the album, the repetitive rock rumble of Not Tonight that just wants to boogie down with some simple rock numbers but keep having to fight with this ugly void of noise and psych-oddness that wants to consume the straight-up straight-down Stooges-rock in the drowning pull of its manic squawk and wonder. Weirdpunk garage freakouts, protopunk succumbing to the hateblasted deathscream of chomping jazznoise, staggering in its ungodly threat and magnitude. Rudimentary Peni sings MC5, psychotically dismember the jams. It's an album for shakin' your stuff and then crying in the corner as the trip kicks in and faces around you start to melt and wail with the warm red devil-eye flutter of the unfamiliar clublights.

Scumraid - Demo

Wild fuckin' crazynoise from South Korean rawpunx. K-punx crasher crust brutalising Disclose runarounds, guitar flails lost in the blasting power, songs that seem to start the twisting screaming wind-up almost as soon as they've started and burn themselves out in 70 seconds of shitty hunger and squealing nuclear death. A relentless 8 minutes of disgusting aural defilements.