Wild Billy Childish & the Spartan Dreggs - Coastal Command/Dreggradation/Tablets of Linear B

Like Michael Moorcock's bibliography or the vaulting scope of human experience itself, Billy Childish's musical output is unknowably vast and impossibly labyrinthine every time digging deeper into that dirt-simple rock and roll. This year his latest project, The Spartan Dreggs, put out three fucking full-length LPs, THREE! This is pretty much business as usual for Childish, basic but literate punk stomps, though its got a slightly more spindly sound to it in the vocals from Neil Palmer, drawing to mind a more vulnerable air than the sneer of a lot of Childish's oeuvre  the Spartan Dreggs' highlights include running an AE Housman poem through that spare garage-spark on A Shropshire Lad, penning sad songs about modernist Swiss writer Robert Walser on The Ballad of Robert Walser, wailing plaintively on Grimpen Mire, a five-minute rumbling indie-punk takeback of the word 'epic' on the Homeric Headlong Fly the Achaeans.

Bits of Shit - Cut Sleeves

Stooges swagger and gut and snot, rumbling basslines and the nasal bite of the vocals while the guitars flail and thrash about them. They've got the feel of the more bluesy New Bomb Turks numbers, and more than a hint of Eric Davidson's scathing wit to them as well. Wedding Song takes apart the facade of an unhappy marriage, constructing one of those great break-up songs where it's less about some specific fault but the unsteady foundation that this was built on, sneering "Two kids playing an adult game You can't fix your identity by changing your name".

Rock Sing excoriates the tedious old punk fucks who run through the same tutting bullshit they rebel against and have totally boomer'd up in their narcissistic accidental conflation of their own narrow tepid cultural narrative with the entire span of fucking human culture, whining "Their rock’n’roll IS noise pollution" about the teenage music of today. Red Blade snarls with mid-tempo slasher menace. Patrol begins with a sort of outraged-warning call-and-response that is filtered vocally through a Joey Vindictive pastiche of a reproaching mother and goes on to construct a short war song that never really comes down one side or the other in its condemnation but, like the whole albums, is bathed in an air of baleful contempt for fucking everything. This is mean, minatory rock and roll. On Homeless Records.