#its not just women with guitars its THE DISTORTION the fuzzy noise the way it builds her specific singing style the power the seriousness

[bmpmp3]

it sucks when ur trying to find more music similar to a specific song but all ur “songs like ___” or r/ifyoulikeblank google searches are yielding NOTHING because everyone else looking wants more music similar to different criteria of said song that you do. point #834904985403 as to why we need to bring the hyper specific microgenre names of electronic music to all genres (joking. ....unless?)

[futuresandpasts]

Futures & Pasts | MRR #423

Words on some new & recently unearthed recordings from Plastic EP & the Records, Nylex, Blowdryer, Germ House & Far Corners, from Maximum Rocknroll #423 (August 2018). 

On their debut 45 from 1981, Melbourne’s PLASTIC EP and the RECORDS crashed through a whole jumble of outsider DIY reference points, where Nuggets-on-a-budget garage stomp with a wobbly organ collided with the economical punk of first-wave UK bands like the SUBWAY SECT. It’s a holy grail obscurity of the early ‘80s Aussie weirdo underground, but it turns out that the group’s most flipped-out sounds were actually committed to tape shortly after the release of the first record, intended for a two-song follow-up single that never materialized due to the studio losing the masters. Luckily for all of us, PLASTIC EP and crew had dubbed rough mixes of the songs to cassette, and they’ve finally seen the light of day as proper 7” (alongside a combined reissue of the first 45 and 1982’s New Wave-ish “Secret Love” single, by which time they’d changed their name to the EPs) thanks to a new Australian label called Xerox Music. A-side “Well You Want to Make A Record” is total untrained post-punk madness, in which PLASTIC EP and the RECORDS ditch their original drummer for the clatter of a Dr. Rhythm drum machine, add some wild, buzzsaw guitar scrape, and top it with deadpan hollering about how to make a record (“add a bit of bass / not so much snare!”), which basically winds up sounding like some long-lost electro-punk successor to the DESPERATE BICYCLES’ do-it-yourself incantations. On the flip, “I’m Not Coming Back” is more subdued in an off-kilter TELEVISION PERSONALITIES kind of way, with psychedelic meandering piano only slightly tempering the frenetic drum machine pulse and flurry of distorted guitar. A lost classic, and very much in line with the shambolic and surreal industrial art-punk that the equally great SUNDAY PAINTERS were crafting several hours away in Wollongong during the same era, if you’d like to do some further digging. (Xerox Music, xeroxmusicaustralia.bandcamp.com)

Outside of the FALL, PYLON have arguably been the most important band in shaping and influencing every conception that I have of what could be considered the post-punk ideal. I’ve made references in the past to PYLON bassist Michael Lachowski’s assertion that the group’s primary intention was to make art with instruments, and just as modern art is often dismissed as something that could be easily recreated by anyone due to the seeming simplicity of its technique or forms, PYLON’s brilliantly minimalist art-punk approach seems to be evoked as a misguided comparison for more and more contemporary bands just because they also happen to have an affinity for mutant disco rhythms or sharp, brittle stabs of guitar. So a PYLON reference isn’t something that I drop casually, but if anyone is deserving of one these days, it’s this new quartet from Adelaide, Australia called NYLEX, whose self-titled debut cassette has all of the tightly-wound and danceable tension of Gyrate, with the addition of some goth-leaning smudged eyeliner melancholy. The shimmering guitar and ethereal, shadowy melodies in “Heavy Air” and “Against the Knife” conjure some serious early 4AD-level drama, but it’s the dark and understated but deeply propulsive basslines that really give each of the tape’s six songs their shape, allowing the vocals plenty of space to zig-zag from subtle whispers to stern, obliquely dissociated narrations. And when they’re at their most stark and jagged (see: “Fascinate” or “Decide”), NYLEX’s coolly restrained post-punk paranoia really does draw a perfectly shaky line directly from Athens in 1980 to Adelaide in 2018. (Tenth Court, nylextenthcourt.bandcamp.com)

Philadelphia’s BLOWDRYER are back with a self-titled tape consisting of their first new recordings since 2014’s Deprogrammed cassette, and they’ve apparently spent the last few years stripping their previous sugar-spiked, BREEDERS-ish noise-pop framework into some seriously taut nouveau-wave. The fuzzed-out group harmonies in the relative jangly “Over and Over” help connect the dots between BLOWDRYER and guitarist Sarah Everton’s previous band BLEEDING RAINBOW, but it’s a relative outlier this time around, as the anxious, jittery precision of songs like “Underdeveloped” and “Photocopy” more often suggests early WIRE as translated by modern punk women in a basement with a four-track machine. Lyrical phrases are shouted out and repeated like anti-slogans pulled from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series (“you know I’m well aware of my self-satisfaction,” or “your life is in balance, you have total control”), backed by needling slashes of guitar and bashed drums for some of the best lo-fi URINALS-besotted racket since the arrival of those first two NOTS singles, before they tumbled down the synth-punk path. Really hope it takes them a little less than four years to put something else out after this one... (blowdryer.bandcamp.com)

Justin Hubbard has been knocking out angular, nervous-edged post-punk and damaged DIY pop with both GERM HOUSE and FAR CORNERS over the last several years, and a new split cassette collects eight songs from each project that were recorded between 2015 and 2017 in the midst of a relocation from Las Cruces, New Mexico to Rhode Island. Hubbard handles all of the instrumental duties in GERM HOUSE, crafting skewed and scrappy melodies that generally recall the Xpressway Records bands who lobbied a noisier and more experimental response to the Flying Nun-dominated 1980s Kiwi pop scene, by way of the tape hiss-saturated hooks of various home-recording, Ohio-based oddballs in the GUIDED BY VOICES/TIMES NEW VIKING continuum. In contrast, FAR CORNERS are a full-fledged band in the paranoid future-punk style of the A FRAMES or ANRGY ANGLES, all loping basslines, choppy guitar and stuttering rhythms, urgent and agitated and appropriately blown-out because reality is a mess. The shared DNA between the two sides of the split becomes a little more apparent in GERM HOUSE songs like “Inside the Room” or “Over/Under,” which center the sort of ramshackle keyboard squeals and buttoned-up/waved-out bounce that earned any number of late ‘70s/early ‘80s Midwestern art-punk bands a spot in the Hyped to Death hall of fame. When was the last time you came across a non-compilation C60 of wall-to-wall hits? This one certainly seems to fit the bill.  (Fuzzy Warbles, fuzzywarbles.bandcamp.com)