Sheer Mag - II 7"

The second 7" of this Philadelphia punk band. Sheer Mag lay a patina of dirt over classic rock riffs, like Thin Lizzy as a region rock band. Free bent outta shape, Bent Outta Shape dragged through with hooks. Echoes of bits of powerpop like The Frenchmen's No Surprise and its melancholic pomp, something like Hanson Brothers's Right Back Where We Started From cover but jumping back to Maxine Nightingale's original vocals.

It opens with Fan the Flames's shimmy swagger, rueful bad neighbourhood blues, singing of old houses and decrepit fixings, reverberating with that Double Duce charm, the chaos of a home that is shabby and barely held-together both inside ("Getting hard to stay in tune/The boys are getting me down/I'll be staying in my room") and out ("In the dark and the bitter cold/They're freezing us out/It's as good as gold"), but still shakes and lives with the feeling of a home in spite of the spectre of gentrification lurking in the background.


Travelin' On's jangle and sway cataloging the whispering lure of the roads, the rough shackles of wanderlust, living drifter mythic, burnt bridges and patched soles and leaving town as you watch yourself leave town, moving like a snowball down a hill, silently gathering yourself for an impact. "When all the smoke was clearing out/Oh yeah I was on my own/I ain't coming home to you/I was born to roam the streets yeah."

Button Up a fuck-you self-affirmation, that precarious place where telling others you're not to be fucked with and at the same time convincing yourself of that fact, of telling yourself you can deal with some shit, of screaming at the world that you're through with their shit. "I'm taking time whatever I do/I'm working hard whatever I do/With You"

Whose Side Are You On?, echoing the old union tune, but grounding it less in accusatory polemic than in the bonds of friendship and understanding stretched in the face of too much real shit, as slipperily unsteady as it it forceful and joyous. "The factory wheels'll keep spinnin along/It ain't cut and dried/And it never will/But the fightin' baby that's half of the thrill"

The diminutives and asides that pepper the lyrics adding to the sharp familiarity they carry, 2nd and 1st person, conversationally poetic, a distillation of times when you somehow managed to say the right thing. They assume you're conversant with certain knowledges, certain struggles. And these are often worn topics, the road, home, friendship, the fight, your fight, but they're worn like scarred fists, discoloured deformed couches, rusty cars with silly nicknames. They're worn with real living process and the battering winds of experience.

That's part of what gets this songs stuck so deep into you, like the way the Hold Steady could root around in a riffed up charger and pull out of it a smaller closer story, but with greater personal kick here, a more tender gutpunch, a brighter spark. Mixing those punk-fractured intimacies and dilemmas with a wayward scrappy version the kind of music that reminds you of your dad getting really drunk and ranting about how he wants this song, this song playing right now, blasted at his funeral good and loud.

I've had this EP on my phone for a couple months now and back in May after a show it had me half-cut and footloosin' it up around an empty coach station at 2am, work seven hours and 220 miles of megabus away, but I was skipping around free in myself in a way I rarely feel until I got too hype and attempted to leap gracefully onto a bench coming very close to a dramatic faceplant. These songs swallow you up in their world, they tell you to fuck off and hold you tight with the roughness of a true friend, they get you movin, whether it's out into the world or just onto to the dancefloor. There are always steps that you need to take, there are some steps that you need to be reminded to take. By a friend or by a song.

The Number Ones - The Number Ones

Scrappy power-pop from Ireland, living that Protex/Undertones feel, kicking with more modern bands like The Love Triangle, Sheer Mag, Nightmare Boyzzz. Golden-throated, broken-hearted, electrified emotions channeled and chopped into brief two-minute bursts of pure shuffle/shaking feeling, dancefloor punk classics with sugar and bounce, pop-rocks and cola spit, from the stab and stop Heartsmash, Sixteen's tumbling runner, He's Too Good whatever drawl, to the just 100% all-the-way banger Sharon Shouldn't, all itchy-fuzz scritchy and sweet-voiced in equal measure. Power-pop exists as pretty much the perfect singles genre, often tiring in full-length form, but The Number Ones don't outstay their welcome, keeping it at a nipped-and-tucked 20 minutes of tight, melodic and moody, smooth and stinging, crackling fizzbang whizzpunk. Timeless tunes with the eternal ecstatic energy of the turbulent and sparking emotional present.

The Modern Pets - Sorry, Thanks LP

Punchy jumpy punk rock from Genrmany, kicking hard and rockin and rollin'. Snappy tunes of Exploding Hearts/Tranzmitors/Buzzcocks power-pop, new-wave warbles, those disaffected dry vocals. From the bleary scumbag snap of Pilsator ("AGAIN YOU WOKE UP IN THE DIRT/"FUCK OFF!" IS THE LAST THING YOU'VE HEARD/ALL YOUR GOALS AND TRIES ARE JUST FOR VAIN...") cutting between simple key lines, guitar scrambles, handclaps, to the corpsing joy of Funeral Fun ("YOUR EYES ARE FULL OF JOY/SEEING ME IS BETTER THAN TV/NOT MY FAULT THAT YOU WEAR BLACK/NOW THERE'S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN GET BACK") and the choppy up-and-down ah-fuck-it skitter of I'm Not a Brick, with its whirlwind bass dances, its spinning-dizzily chorus, its fastpop jab: "IT'S ALL PART OF THE COSMIC JOKE". Catchy kicks and stupid fucks. Fuck work (Clocked Assholes), fuck the media (News), fuck me and my dumb mouth (The Walking Contradiction), fuck internet popularity contests (No Access) and above all, fuck not dancing, fuck not shaking it. It's the sort of album where you think they're gonna throw in the word 'baby' at the end of every line, even when they don't.
 

Nightmare Boyzzz - Bad Patterns

Hookmachine heartachers Nightmare Boyzzz crank out 11 tracks of sweet battered powerpop with bummer vibes, where the jump and yelp and "Whoa-ohs" and constantly seem like they're about to drift off and leave you stranded by the side of the road, ten miles from home with nothing but your thoughts and holey shoes to get you home. Each warm guitar lick feels like a goodbye, drawn in the milieu of bad decisions, empty bottles, hangovers and selfish self-destruction, Guitar Romantic echoes, the warm drunk buzz will leave you just as the songs in the rockin and rollin of You Have No Friends, the mellow wanderings of You're a Star, rapidscuttle garagepop of Baby It's Alright, the whiskey satisfaction fades and discomfort will grow in its place with tickling guitar solos and scratchy riffs,  Say What You Mean might be an up-down dance reminiscent of a punked-up run of Supergrass's Alright but it also lives to cool and burn off the beer in the sobering ennui. This'll help you move your feet so you don't have to think about it though.

The Love Triangle - Clever Clever

Rumbling propulsive 77 punk punch. There are bits of power-pop smoothness, bits of garage-punk snot, closest in make-up maybe to straight-up punk bands like The Pigs or The Radiators, all those little first wave hangers on cranking out jumpy punk runarounds, or KBD soulpunk flashes like The Law's Hole in my Heart, in terms of more modern bands, it recalls stuff like the Exploding Hearts and their throwback rock and roll edge, but while bands like that are built more around the jab and itch of the guitar, Clever Clever for the most part tumbles along in the wake of the throb of the bass, scampering this way and that, hitched to the low-end. Yeah there are aggressively infectious guitar lines like on the vituperous Just You Wait  ("Just you wait til I get cancer!"), or the suave spikepop of The Wait, the grubby needling of Swift Exit, but really this album feels meaty and blocky in its construction, feels deep and gutsy and bolted confidently to its own engine.


The Wait, Just You Wait, the chug and pump of I'm Still Waiting for the Buzz, tension infects this album, the songs woundtight and cramped, pushed together and ready to snap, ready to spool out with snaking chaos, degrade and roll over the hill sad and old, like the promises of Just You Wait and Be Old Soon, it's an album aware of what lays ahead, so it crackles and dances with what life it has now.


It still slows down now and then, I'm Still Waiting for the Buzz, the dragged out cynicism of Hollywood Sleaze, the chilledout fuck it of The Situation is Excellent  ("Are we living in the end times?/Have a drink and take a rest") and those are nice change-ups, but when this album really hits its full pace, on Tangle or Future Tense or others, there's nothing like it.

Dancepunk does not mean what it could mean, it means all new-wavey stuff, cleaned-up funk-punk, echoes of Gang  of Four and what not, art and keyboards and disco shine, which can be cool, can be a good time, but then it leaves me struggling to put words to the physical sensation of Clever Clever. But maybe that's a good thing, shutting off one linguistic alley makes you scramble and search for a new one, a more refined descriptor to pin into the music. Dancepunk, what it could mean are these sort of wriggly Lurkers-lumped punk rock numbers, that shuffle and step quickly and purposefully, that move like you want to move, that pull you out of yourself with every tossed-off riff or bass turn or drum shiver, punk for dancers. Move yourself to this beat, pop like a broken bass-string, find yourself, draw yourself, make yourself, punk melodic and guitar frantic.

On Static Shock records.

Low Culture - Screens

Screens is pop-punk that shrugs off the taint of cleanliness that infects some of that genre, ex-Marked Men/Shang-A-Lang Dirtnap goodness, songs that snap into each other so quickly and sharply that sometimes you think it's just a rhythm shift in one song. Clackety power-pop that often seems to turn on that modern life alienation axis, all medication ("But I can't seem to replace the space that was left behind" on Pills) and distance, the thrum of technology and the croon of separation, like Royal Headache by way of Subhumans songs, or Lost in the Supermarket torn through by the Carbonas.

"I can't keep these demons from crawling in" shouts Nightmare in a full punk tumble, "You say you wanna take me out well take me out" drawls Waste the Day Away. But this focus on emptiness, so perfectly captured in the little trills that burst out of the garage-punk shiver, finding respite on the mellower California with bubbling sunny pop melodies and refrain of "But tonight I'm getting fucked up in California/Drinking whiskey on the beach/And all those kids who were better than me/Well they're probably sitting home watching their TV" This always feels to me like a small album, it's not some all encompassing statement, it's not a blast of noise to rearrange and reconfigure, it's a tight punk picture of some bad stuff and some good stuff, wrapped up in sweet vocal lines and hooky doxologies to our troubles and tenseness and what breaks through.

Worthwhile Way - Love is All

Worthwhile Way, in their new release on ADD Records, do a nice line in sweet skippy Japanese punk-pop that frequently indulges in some folky clicks and country twang along the lines of a cleaner (way cleaner), less fucked-up and raw, Tex and the Horseheads or what The Gateway District did on their first LP stuff like The Highway Song, a bubblegum bounce Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels, a smoothed out One Man Army. Melodic vocals that dance about, serenading, shouting, sometimes Mayu stopping singing to talk in matter-of-fact kinda way, like it's a quick aside to audience. Highlights include the namesake track and it's sweepalong power-pop, the gentle slowly building twist of Birds Sing, Family Song and its drop outs and high-pitched vocal acrobatics and singalong pep, a version of the folk standard The Frozen Logger that's got a kinda low-rent Jake Thackray rise-and-fall feel to it and a Billy Bragg cover almost as good as Discount ever managed with Northern Industrial Town.

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.

The Capitalist Kids - Lessons on Love, Sharing and Hygiene

Capitalist Kids purvey the classic Lookout-sound matched with sarcastic lyrics taking aim at the many shit vagaries of late-period capitalist oligarchy, and then a bunch of songs about girls too. Billy Bragg covers, Dr Frank-aping quicksmart vocal twitches and switchback wit, songs about different generations of delusional arseholes in Ayn and Weasel, sorta wistful youth-leavin' angst on Three-Oh. This album is the sort of silly self-deprecating ramonescore twist that can entitle a love song We Are Each Ultimately Alone in the Universe. Power-fightin' power-pop.