#total punk

[sonofshermy]

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[oarworm]

Wrong Side Of It - The Retail Simps

[dustedmagazine]

Negative Gears—Moraliser (Total Punk)

Moraliser, by Negative Gears

8 track album

Negative gearing is a term for an investment where the cost of ownership is more than the rate of return—as might be the case, for instance, if you bought an apartment building that required more money to maintain than it generated in rent. It is, perhaps, the most pointless of capitalist activities, one in which, for all the effort involved, the investor digs him or herself into an ever deeper hole, and it can serve as a metaphor for all kinds of economic struggle. Slightly modified, it is also the name of a kick-ass garage punk band from Australia, whose dire but tuneful racket recalls the epic dystopias of the Wipers and the new wave glamor of Echo & the Bunnymen.

This is Negative Gear’s second full-length, though it’s been half a decade since the self-titled debut (which Maximum Rock ‘N Roll described approvingly as “Six demented screeds bifurcated by one ’80s synth interlude”). That’s a rough five years, including COVID, lock-down, raging forest fires, growing income inequality and an increasing sense of climate doom, and Moraliser reflects the trauma. “I…..hate myself….hate myself,” howls the singer in claustrophobic “Room,” a room which nightmarishly contains only a mirror.

The album really gets going in its mid-section where muscular riffs power through a cavernous, echoing ruin. “Ants” imagines a striver taking in the panoramic views from his apartment, congratulating himself on his success (“I guess some people just can’t handle the unbearable pressure of an upper middle lifestyle”). By the song’s end, though, he’s jumped to his death (“Sixteen stories to paradise”). The narrative is grim, but the music is stirring, anthemic, eruptive, a swell of synth bursting from clanking, chugging post-punk riffs. You can make connections to brute force Aussie punk bands like Eddy Current and Total Control, but there’s a dark romanticism in there that reminds me of Echo & the Bunnymen, too.

“Lifestyle” is the album’s churning vortex, its main riff circling downward like a whitewater eddy. “Always, always, always,” chants the singer in broad, flat Australian vowels, and you can hear him and the whole band scrabbling at the edges of modern life, trying not to go down. “Pills,” which follows, is boxier and more propulsive, chugging maniacally forward on a pick-clanking bassline.

Moraliser is all sinew and effort, bulling forward with doomed energy even as the walls close in. It’s the sound of trying so hard in a system that’s rigged against you, of not going under without a ferocious struggle, the sound, maybe, of negative gears gnashing on their way to the abyss.

Jennifer Kelly

[12xurecs]

the hotly anticipated 2nd album from Montreal's RETAIL SIMPS is now in stock at 12XU mail order. Is this the greatest story every told? Are th' Simps the greatest rock and roll ensemble of the 2000's? MAYBE. QUITE POSSIBLY. How do you expect me to know for sure, am I some kind of list-making keeper of the gates?

Because I fucking hate hyperbole I will say hearing this album is the most incredible thing that's happened to me this autumn. Yes, i've had a really shitty autumn, but that's not what I meant.

THEEE RETAIL SIMPS - 'Live On Cool Street' LP (Total Punk)

After countless hours of data driven market research it was determined that the wild success of the first Retail Simps album , “Reverberant.

[dustedmagazine]

Tee Vee Repairman — What’s on TV (Total Punk)

What's On TV? by Tee Vee Repairmann

Tee Vee Repairman makes an old-school garage punk racket, swamping catchy songs in acid baths of dissonance and feedback. Gangly, mop-headed Ishka Edmeades is the band’s sole consistent member, though the group expands to four in the live setting. Like a hundred punk poets before him, he finds existential angst and jubiliant triumph in the most mundane of settings, a bus stop, the checkout line, the street.

What’s on TV? follows 2022’s full-length Waste My Time Watching TV and an earlier EP called Patterns from 2021. Both previous recordings were released first on Edmeades’ own Warttmann, Inc. label. In addition to running a label, he’s been in and out of a number of Sydney bands, including Devo-esque, electro-punk Set-Top Box, synth-aided punk outfit Satanic Togas and Gee-Tee, which is in much the same Ramones/Thunders/Dead Boys vein as Tee Vee Repairman.

“Bus Stop” is the best song here, a snappy, snotty punk anthem, haunted peripherally by a wavery synth/keyboard bit. It’s a nice touch, turning a straight up, guitar-slashing banger into something surreal and out of kilter, like Exploding Hearts with floating anxiety. It’s fitting, too, since the story is one of expectation turning to creeping unease; we’re at the bus stop waiting for something like Godot, who never shows.

Tee Vee Repairman has Jay Reatard’s knack for splicing the giddy fun of garage punk to musings on life’s utter pointlessness. “What’s the Use?” careens like a carnival ride, calliope tootle and all, a sped up clatter of guitars and drums, yet asks why we’re here and when it will stop. “Drowning” chimes and rattles like a non-stop party tune, yet again, Edmeades is waiting for someone. The sonic high point of the tune is when he wails, “I was drowning,” and you want to join in but it seems a little risky.

I can’t wind this down without a nod to the balls-out swagger of “Checkout Line.” The tune’s got a monster riff at its foundation, slightly syncopated, and Edmeades adopts a stuttering, stop-start cadence to deliver the words in time with it. You can hear the Sex Pistol’s guitar blare and the Clash’s anthemry in the cut. There’s even a bass solo. What’s not to love?

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

New Buck Biloxi — Cellular Automation (Total Punk)

Cellular Automaton by NEW BUCK BILOXI

It's hardly blasphemous to think that at some point, the building blocks of punk aren't going to produce a solid enough foundation to maintain an album's worth of noise. But that time, at least under the watch of Buck Biloxi, has yet to come. 

On his 2022 release for Total Punk, Cellular Automation, New Orleanian Rob Craig, aka Buck Biloxi, and his latest "new" line-up (no more Fucks, folks) mine familiar territory. The lean and mean LP delivers relentless buzzsaw chords, thudding four-on-the-floor rhythms, and plenty of arch, caustic observations about our inevitable "bad future," as one track puts it, generated by the alienation factory that is contemporary society. It all comes wrapped in a warped, mechanical minimalism that transplants the songs from the garage to more subterranean environs conducive to another fortifying round of aesthetic devolution. 

How these songs can be as exhilarating, provocative, and toe-tapping as the best of a genre well past the half-century mark is a testament to Craig's abilities as a songwriter. There is true craft here. He knows precisely which riffs hit like a gut punch and which make you want to throw one yourself; he knows when to roll his eyes and when to give the listener some real talk. The component parts may be simple, but it requires a deft touch to map yet another bleak picture of tomorrow (or today for that matter) onto a simple punk template and not only avoid sounding tired or heavy-handed but deliver something vital. New or old, Fucks or no Fucks, Buck nails it. 

Nate Knaebel

[slovenlyrecordings]

Sick Thoughts tour the USA

with new album “Heaven Is No Fun” on Total Punk!

Hurrs an old one on Black Gladiator / Slovenly: slovenly.bandcamp.com

[dustedmagazine]

Tha Retail Simps — Reverberant Scratch: 9 Shots in the Dark (Total Punk)

Reverberant Scratch: 9 Shots in tha Dark by THA RETAIL SIMPS

Thump, thump, thump, thump on the fours. Tha Retail Simps lead with the block-simplest of drumbeats, the fieriest, most elemental blasts of guitar, sax and bass. “Hit and Run” builds on the funk-soul foundation of Sam & Dave, The Kingsmen, the Woggles and, perhaps not incidentally, the Simps’ fellow Montrealeans in King Khan and the Shrines. From the snowy north, but firmly rooted in the juke joint south, Tha Retail Simps play excitable, inflammatory grooves that remain, nonetheless, firmly in the pocket. Consider, for instance, the body-swaying insistence of the aptly named “End Times Hip Shaker Parts 1 & 2.” It careens wildly, vocals flying every which way (and not always nailed to the right key), guitars flailing fuzzily, but the riff is solid enough to demand a shimmy, then another, then another.

Tha Retail Simps reconfigure an assortment of Montreal punk regulars. Joe Chamandy, of the wild blues-psych banshee wails, is involved in the zine/label/scene promoting outfit Celluloid Lunch. He also records as the one-man Itchy Self. Tom Molander is ex of the drone-y, feedback bending Feeling Figures and plays drums for the poppier, ye ye influenced Hélène Barbier. Chris Burns brought the psychobilly guitar licks to Terminal Sunglasses and American Devices — and does similar high-speed, high-intensity surf mayhem here. James Goddard of noisy, weirdo Skintone and jazz-experimental Egyptian Cotton Arkestra plays sax. All these elements meld with surprising coherence in Tha Retail Simps’ old-time-rnr-through-the-looking-glass onslaught. There’s enough spiraling spontaneity to keep you guessing, but also enough locked-in grooviness to keep you anchored in the here and now.

This is a band with a wild, goofy, not-to-everyone’s-taste sense of humor (see the video, for example, to “Rock ‘N Roll” or maybe don’t). That song, which amazingly doesn’t figure at all in the video of the same name, starts with the drawled-out couplet, “You can cry a river of tears, drown it in a river of beers,” which, linked to a swaggering, foot-stomping, blues-joint cadence, distills the Simps’ desperate hedonism to essentials. These are songs for a party where your house is on fire, but the band plays on, nonetheless.

Moody tripped out “Dozen a Dime” is the ringer here, with its slow-motion bongo beat, its rupturing guitar flares, its snarls and howls of verbiage. It’s the daylight sifting through blue smoke hazed interiors, the contemplative pause when the debauchery winds down, and in its way, elementally rock. Nine shots in the dark, and they all draw blood. All hail Tha Retail Simps.

Jennifer Kelly