CCTV – Quiet EP Favorite disc of 2015! Nervous furtive fraught invocations of the indignities of modern life, anxiety and paranoia, everything sounds like it was recorded on a boombox at the wrong speed adding to the strange feeling of otherworldliness, like walking through a dead mall full of fake plants and broken ideas. It’s perfectly retro, really sounds like a recently excavated secret basement from the 1979 New Wave/punk collision, but it’s from now, and is fresh yet eternal. SU TISSUE dreamscape. SACRED PAWS – Six Songs 12” Perfect record! It’s so energizing and uplifting, total power with an untouchable dreamy/introspective feeling that leaves me reeling. This is post-punk insurrection, like what I imagined SLITS sounded like when I found out that NENEH CHERRY was in a later incarnation of the group…Freedom! Everything Rachel Aggs does is 100% and this is no exception. Her guitar style borrows from the coolest early ’80s London post-punk adventure girls and the most transcendent African Highlife and with the addition of her former GOLDEN GRRLS bandmate Eilidh there’s an added extra layer of melancholic beauty to these uplifting numbers. Listened to this an insane amount of times, truly a great LP. PATSY – Tuley Tude High/Paradise 45 I think PATSY features Nathan and Candice from MYSTIC INANE (who put out two of the best 45s this year!) and this demonstrates that you should just buy everything they do. Killer killer killer! If Dez Cadena was a girl and new dimensions in modern rehashes of previous ideas of punk was a possibility. AQUARIAN BLOOD – Savage Mind EP Total destruction! Like ANGRY ANGLES discovered FATHER YOD and PCP and combined all these things into an insane wall of destruction and woe! I think this band is expansive and features many participants but the driving force being former members of NOTS and a current member of EX-CULT should make your blood pressure rise suitably if you have any sense. LIME CRUSH – Graveyard EP Singer sounds like she should be in KLEENEX, music is somewhere between the more garagey HUGGY BEAR stuff and the PHANTOM PREGNANCIES and this 7” is a non stop killer lurching punk attack! SNEAKS – Gymnastics LP Further evidence the DC scene has experienced major / incendiary rejuvenation in the past couple years… Incredible CHANDRA / 99 Records configuration that I just can’t stop listening to. VIAL – You’re Not Safe EP Krista is an incredible and iconic front person, with a remarkable voice, like if DINAH CANCER was a tough HC girl?! I’ve seen em cover LAST RITES’ “Chunks” but they’ve also get compared to FLIPPER and the BAGS! I think of them as a hardcore band but have gotten in arguments with people about it, perhaps because women are never truly “hardcore” according to the general punk populace?! I have no idea how anyone could listen to this and not think that it’s a hardcore record though. The guitar is burly in a classic Touch n Go manner, the lyrics are smart and to the point, and interrogate gentrification and gender constructs as well as total alienation/anxiety. I love this band, and this 45 is killer. BLACK TIME – Aerial Gobs of Love LP All hail BLACK TIME, architects of the brutal and arcane…Transporting the listener to the collapsing concrete shopping centers of London, in which girls and boys as informed as much by the Medway Sound as the Situationist ideal hack out a new / old existence in the ashes of commerce. What other group could summon thoughts of HUGGY BEAR, SWELL MAPS, early Michigan garage sounds, Musique Concrète, girls in bootleg Mary Quant / Bridget Riley get ups reading Sheila Delaney’s teenage works…BLACK TIME is the way and the truth. The sound of irate bedroom masterworks—when Lemmy Caution shouts he’s got no expectations you can feel that tool Jagger’s smug sprawl of expectations slowly eating away at the earth… Janey Too-bad’s voice on the title track makes me wanna grab a Silvertone and join the WHAT FOUR (or the MOD 4). Anyway this is a piercing, shambling, devastating view into two years of bedroom recordings by London’s only garage band MIDNITE SNAXX – Don’t Wake Me Up/ Shades 45 Never really paid attention to these punkers, I remember their ealier records being sort of more power pop/Bomp! girlsound, which is cool, but not always what I want. Then this sick 45 appeared and I realized I needed to shape the fuck up. Insane KBD/Girls in the Garage hybrid sounds for furious modernists! Kill or be killed. SHITFUCKS – Det Är Ditt Fel EP I described this to a friend as “the Swedish ABORTED with an insane possessed lady who could be in KLEENEX or RUTTO singing” and if that isn’t want you want out of life then I can’t help you.
Runners up: MYSTIC INANE – both 45s, DRINKS – LP / PIERRE & BASTIEN LP / NOTS – 45 /TERRY – EP/ ANGIE LP /LA MISMA LP / VEXX – EP / /CONEHEADS LP / VIAL – EP / VIOLENCE CREEPS flexi+EP / BLACK ABBA – 45 / LA MISMA LP / SHOPPING – LP
CASSETTES/DEMOS: BLACK ABBA, G.L.O.S.S., MOZART, THE WORLD, AQUARIAN BLOOD, SUSAN, UROCHROMES, FREAK, VERTIGO, JJ DOLL, BIG BLEACH, PENNYCRESS, GENDERDOG, NAIL CLUB, 100%, RAYS, SBSM, GAUCHE.
REISSUES INDEX-45/BIKINI KILL-Revolution Girl Style Now-LP / PINK SECTION – LP / INFLATABLE BOY CLAMS 2xEP / STICK MEN WITH RAY GUNS – LP / PLASTIX – Ich Bin Modern! LP / TOŽIBABE – Dežuje EP / SCHUND – EP / SOBERANÍA PERSONAL – Benditos Sean Muñecos Que Pegan LP / BROKEN TALENT – Rules No One LP / BILLY SYNTH / DEPARTMENTSTORE SANTAS – LP / MERCENÁRIAS – Demo 1983 EP / THE ELECTRONIC HOLE - The Electronic Hole / COUNTRY TEASERS – Empire Strikes Back LP
THINGS TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2016: COURTNEYS LP, SPIDER AND THE WEBS LP, WITCHING WAVES LP, IN SCHOOL EP, VEXX, MOZART 45, HYSTERICS discog LP, JJ DOLL triple LP, PIECE WAR 12”, THE WORLD EP (former members of Pang and Penny Machine! Plus Andy Human, coolest new local group!) also the punks demand more Patsy, more Black Abba, more SBSM, more Nots, more ONJ and more CCTV. Along with more Low Life and Constant Mongrel, more Total Control too. As the wise sage Tomata Du Plenty once inferred: if I can’t have what I want / I don’t want anything.
