Sharing the sharing.
Milwaukee 4-piece Fox Face punch you in the mouth and then kick you while you’re down with their blistering, heavy (à la early Sleater-Kinney) brand of punk rock on their newest album, End of Man.
Check out the title track below. Their label PR calls it the “best song Black Sabbath never wrote”. That description nails it!
End of Man is available now via Dirtnap Records. I highly recommend it.
I’m a big fan of The Blind Shake, when I found out that Jim Blaha had another another band – Jim And The French Vanilla – I was all ears. Turns out, this is Jim’s 3rd release under the Jim And The French Vanilla moniker, his previous two releases were solo, acoustic efforts that were super limited and released on CDR. For this new album, Afraid of The House, Jim recruited his brother (also in Blind Shake) Mike Blaha, and together they’ve turned out a 26 minute beat down of blistering, scuzzy, garage rock goodness. Give “When You’re Down” and “Eye For An Eye” (below) a spin. Enjoy.
[We have Afraid of The House on beautiful black vinyl – in the 3hive Co-op Shop, while supplies last.]
Nothing beats an old comfortable chair. You can sit in other chairs and they’ll treat you right, but you always go back to the comfortable one. I have a chair like this in my house. It’s way old, a bit tattered, and you can feel a couple of the springs when you sit in it, but man, when you need to relax it always does the trick. Punk rock is like the old comfortable chair. I can go far away from it, listening to music on the opposite end of the spectrum, but when I hear a good punk rock song, it’s like being back in the comfortable chair. When I heard Low Culture for the first time today, I was back in the comfortable chair. Low Culture just released their debut LP (vinyl only for now) Screens on Dirtnap. The band is made up of members of The Marked Men and Shang-A-Lang. The title track below is a great punk rock song. It’s quick, it’s tight, it’s kind of grimey–not over-produced. Hear for yourself, then hurry over to Dirtnap’s store and get you a copy of the LP, they only pressed a few hundred, or you can wait until the digital version is released on January 9th. Enjoy.
Low Culture – Screens from Screens (2012/2013)
Mean Jeans are a pop-punk band out of Portland Oregon. They released their second album, On Mars, back in April on Dirtnap, it is catchy as hell! Full of rad hooks and goofy lyrics, On Mars blows through 36 minutes without really taking any time to breathe. The track below, “Anybody Out There”, they pull out all the stops with xylophone (i’m guessing) at the beginning and “oh-oh-oh’s” throughout. It’s a great punk rock track, and would fit nicely into any summertime playlist. Enjoy.
Mean Jeans – Anybody Out There? from On Mars (2012)
Sonic Avenues, a punk band out of Montreal, Quebec. Their second album, Television Youth, came out in January on Dirtnap Records. The title track, included below is a great example of their dirty, loud, lo-fi punk rock sound.
I love punk rock. I love everything about it. I enjoy it in almost all of it’s forms. No matter how broad my musical tastes have become with old age, when I hear good punk rock I get really excited. Bad Sports is good punk rock. Hailing from Denton, Texas, they do everything good punk bands do, including tight guitars, snotty vocals, and songs about girls. Bad Sports play with serious energy, their songs are very catchy and have an old school vibe to them, drawing comparisons to bands such as the Buzzcocks. “Can’t Just Be Friends”, the track below, reminds me a lot of the Ramones with a little Hard-Ons mixed in. Yes, I just wrote that. Their 2nd LP Kings of The Weekend just came out and it’s really good, you should go buy it.
Bad Sports – Cant Just Be Friends from Kings of The Weekend (2011)
Mind Spiders is the new project of Marked Men singer Mark Ryan. Their debut self-titled album is definitely not a Marked Men redo. The punk rock is still there, just now it’s full of reverb and distortion, like mold has grown on it. Along with the fuzz is the sci-fi noises that make the album sound at times like it was intended for a B-movie soundtrack. The song “No Romance” is one of the more punk rock songs on the album. It’s quick song, just under two minutes, but it gives you a small taste of the lo-fi goodness that this album consists of. Thirteen songs in total, including a spaced out version of Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin”, the album takes a little over 30 minutes to listen to before you start it over again, because it’s so good, you’ll have to play it again.
– By Todd S