there was A LOT this month that I wanna talk about, and I listened to much more than what would fit in this top 25 grid. I'm feeling unusually verbose today so under the cut I'm gonna try putting my experiences with music this month and my thoughts on different releases into writing. This post is very long but I bolded new topics so you can easily skim it
Anyways, LOTS of music talk under the cut:
Probably the biggest release if you're around the alternative/pink/diy scene on social media is the debut album "Love Me Forever" by Pinkshift. They have such an energetic and dynamic take on emo and (pop) punk and definitey worth checking out. Also very excited to see a queer PoC band making such a big impact on the alternative music scene as well. They originally dropped an EP last year which I already thought was fantastic and it's very good to see they are able to keep up the energy and creativity for a whole album. Since they got picked up by a Hopeless Records, which is a decently sized label with proper distribution channels, I was also able to pick up a CD copy of the album without having to pay a fortune for shipping.
Brutus is a very interesting band that I've been keeping taps on since their first album. They just released their third, "Unison Life". They have made quite a name for themselves by now, but if you never heard them, they have a very unique sound, combining elements of punk, shoegaze, post-rock and sludge metal (i guess?) into something that sounds incredibly organic like they're doing the most basic type of music there is. While having enjoyed it, I didn't connect super hard with their last album, so I was a bit expecting them to develop into a direction I wasn't as interested anymore and losing interest, but this album definitely won me back again. Incredibly good stuff. Aside from their very unique sound, they also are a very unique live experience, with their singer also being the drummer, and she is set up sideways in the corner, facing the stage rather than the audience. I was able to catch them live a couple of years ago their second album (the one I didn't like as much) and it was a super cool experience, and I'm hoping they come around to my area again some time in the future (also so I can get an opportunity to pick up the new album on CD which I sadly didn't do this time to avoid shipping costs). Them being from Belgium (but the label unfortunately from the UK) they are pretty close to where I live so my chances are pretty good.
I guess I got into OFF! finally? I was aware of this band for a long time, being a Keith Morris project (formerly of Black Flag and Circle Jerks) this of course gets a lot of attention everywhere, but I never really cared that much until now. They released their new album Free LSD (technically last month but the buzz around it took a bit to catch up to me). This being rooted in oldschool hardcore I expected something much more straight forward, but oh no! This album has so much experimentation, dynamic and even jazzy finesse to it. It's a very cool sound. It sounds dark, angry and threatening, but also playful and highly creative. The album feels a tad too long for me though, after a while the impact this sound is able to make on me wears out a little bit and I think I'd like it more if it was cut short a little bit, but that doesn't change how brilliant the sound is they created on this album.
The one big ska punk release for me this month was Talco. They're a band from Italy (also singing in Italian). They have a style that combines ska punk with Italian folk, though the folk part doesn't come through a lot on their new album "Videogame" and the preceeding EP "Insert Coin". It's lightning fast, banging ska punk and rips and is a ton of fun. I recall reading that musically they were taking a lot of influence from the Fat Wreck Chords skate punk sound, which I also have a lot of appreciation for, though I do miss the folk a little on this album cause that's the thing that made their sound so uniquely fun. Still, a great ska punk album if you like fast music with toot toot. To get still get some of the folk feeling, last year they released the debut album "Locktown for their side project Talco Maskerade, which is also something I had completely missed until I read closer into their recent endevours. I'm usually not that much into acoustic projects, but this one's a ton of fun with a lot of energy and still plenty of horns. If you're into Streetlight Manifesto, this project would be comparable to Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution.
They didn't make it into the 5x5 because that format heavily disadvantages EPs, singles, and long single tracks, but I've also been making an active effort getting more into Fucked Up. I've always had some issues with this band primarily to do with their production / sound mixing cause their sound always sounds rather flat to me, which is the case pretty much consistently with every release so at this point I just assume it's just an artistic decision I don't vibe with. But musically, they are extremely interesting and prolific and have a giant, unwieldy discography with countless weird releases to explore, which I always love to do. They have a very interesting, artistic and very proggy take on hardcore punk that incorporates many different styles and sounds and often have long, windy progressive song structures. They released the EP "Oberon" early in the month, which sounds a lot more like metal than punk, their singer's already growly voice being underlined with dark, almost doomy riffs, a few weeks later announced a new full length album for early next year called "One Day". I've also been checking out some of their Zodiac series of releases, which are typically EPs, featuring massive 15-20 minute long tracks, their latest "Year of the Horse" being a massive 4 part epic spanning an entire 90 minutes. Not music I would want to listen to every day but absolutely fascinating stuff to least be aware of and dabble into ocassionally.
There was also a lot of German post-punk! The highest profile band here probably being Fehlfarben, who have been around since forever and are mainly remembered for their 1980 debut "Monarchie und Alltag", which is considered one of the most important German punk albums, but they're still (again?) around and putting out consistently very good angry new wave post-punk material, such as their latest album "?0??" that dropped this month. After the release of the album, I bought the CD as well as the previous 3 albums from their label and got a free Fehlfarben tote bag on top. The albums all came in full-fledged digipacks with elaborate artwork and booklets so that was very much worth the money (many record labels nowadays release CDs in very cheap, slim digisleeves with only a very barebones booklet at most so I'm always happy when you actually still get nice packaging on new releases). Another one that really caught my attention is the new self-titled album by Die Nerven. They have a rather mellow but gloomy sound, but ocassionally break out into louder and more aggressive sections and it lands very well. Many of the lyrics themes really spoke to me as well, especially the chorus of the opening track "ich dachte irgenwie in Europa stirbt man nie" ("somehow I thought you never die in Europe"), which hits very hard in its bleak directness and simplicity. Vizediktator (Vice Dictator, probably my favourite band name in the whole German music scene) also dropped their sophomore album "Was kostet die Welt". They're more on the power pop side of things (they themselves call it street pop), a rough sound, but melodic and catchy, sometimes angry, sometimes mellow. If you want more German post-punk, some other albums I stumbled upon were "Meistenstaat" by Love A (that one came out in August already but missed that release til now) and "Morgen ist auch noch kein Tag" by Kind Kaputt. There's countless really good bands in that general genre of music in Germany (and all of them have excellent graphic design) so if that interests you I can recommend browsing through the record labels of these bands.
Still German, but much harsher and much more electronic, I wanna talk about Kochkraft Durch KMA again (don't bother trying to translate that name, it's complete nonsense). They also dropped their second full length "Alle Kinder Sind Tot" the month before and they were one of two bands I saw live this month. Kochkraft have a very unique sound, and they sound a lot. By which I mean they're very loud. Loud fuzzy guitars, heavy 4 on the floor beats, synthies. Overall, I'd categorize them somewhere between dance punk, noise and industrial. Lyrics range all the way from goofy nonsense to doom and gloom (though this album leans heavily on the darker side), but always delivered with a lot of sarcasm and wit. This album hits hard as hell, but no studio recording could ever match how hard this band hits live. On their previous releases I always though, yeah, this is good, but doesn't convey what this band does live. The new album I thought was a big step up in that regard, I thought it matched their live energy, but then when I actually saw them again, it was even better than expected based on the album. I'm telling you, this band FUCKS. This was the 3rd time I saw them live, both of which were great, but this time they blew everything out of the water. Easily the best show I've seen this year and probably one I will remember as one of the greatest for a long time. The energy this band has live is absolutely unbelievable. Experiencing their performance of the very electronic "Auf jungen Stuten lernt man fluten", in which their lead singer and their drummer (who is also the second vocalist, the beat was being played through one of the synthesizers for this) set up two mics facing each other in the middle of the crowd and shouted the lyrics at each other from within the audience, was like some of the hardest shit i've seen and felt. During their final 1 or 2 songs, their drummer once again went into the audience and started asking random people to give them stuff they were wearing or carrying, like hats, jackets, cameras. glasses. My glasses, I gave them my glasses. They finished the set out wearing all the different clothes and accessoires from people, which was a good bit. It was very funny, I couldn't see much cause I didn't have my glasses, but a sacrifice I was happily willing to make. We all got our stuff back in the end, of course.
The second show I saw was the legendary English punk band Snuff! Seeing such a classic band in a small basement venue is always super sweet. They are ocassionally categorized as ska punk, I don't think that's accurate though. They frequently use horns and keyboards in their songs though, and they also performed with a full 3 piece horn section. This made the small stage pretty crowded, but I very much appreciated that commitment, especially cause I didn't expect to see more than maybe a single trombone, let alone 3 whole dedicated horn players, who I don't believe are a regular part of the band and which I've also never seen before in live recordings of the band. If you've never seen Snuff before, their appearance on stage is also quite unusual. The core band is a 3-piece, with two guys standing at the front playing their instruments and ocassionally doing backup vocals, while their lead singer, i small old english man, sitting at the back behind his drum set, playing VERY fast, while yelling. Cool experience seeing that in person. Being at the show also gave me the opportunity to catch up on buying their latest album free of shipping costs, which has an absurdly long Italian name. The album came out back in April but I had somehow completely missed this (fake fan :/). Very good, old reliable Snuff. Always very fun.
Upcoming shows I'll be going to are Nova Twins very soon in early November and Talco and Enter Shikari in December, all of which I'm extremely excited about.
It being Halloween I was of course inspired to listen to The World/Inferno Friendship Society again. I've been a fan of this band for a couple of years now, but I listened to a couple of their albums again this month and they just have such an incredible energy and style, combining theatre cabaret with punk and anarchist antics and are always a blast to get back into. "Just the Best Party" is, very rightfully, their most popular album, but I also have a sweet spot for their more recent releases. Particularly their latest album "All Borders Are Porous To Cats", which is actually my favourite of theirs, and I am very grateful that Jack Terricloth was able to produce such an incredible final album before his passing last year.
Now to shittalk a little bit. I think the new blink-182 song "Edging" is alright musically if rather unremarkable. But the fact that they're leaning so hard into this teeny-emo-pop-punk image now to me feels beyond rancid, especially with the faux-edgy infantile humor in the lyrics and marketing and just... the way Tom moves in the music video? Maybe that's petty but Tom looks like he's just doing the same overpronounced moves and facial expressions that he did 20+ years ago and it just feels very off to me. Don't like that at all. The image this band is clinging to nowadays is so baffling to me cause they already did their big dark mature reinvention record- 20 years ago! And I love that album, it's my favourite of theirs, despite having "I Miss You" on it! And I've always been under the impression that it's very highly regarded, at least today. But already since "California" I have the feeling they were trying to somewhat revive their image from their glory days of "Enema of the State" and "Take Off Your Pants and Jacket" (perhaps to compensate for Tom leaving the band?), and now that Tom is back that just seems amped up and it just doesn't work at all for me. Tom said in an interview somewhere that the whole album is gonna be experimental so I have a bit of a hope that this new track is an outlier and we might be able to get something more like the self-titled album, but I'm overall mostly pretty cynical about this.
That's just some of the stuff that I listened to and that came out this month. Of course there were other high profile releases like Slipknot, Dropkick Murphys, Kraftklub (this is high profile if you're from Germany) or Gogol Bordello, all of which I enjoyed, but don't have much to say about. But check 'em out, they're good!
As far as my CD collection goes, some second hand highlights I picked up recently are letlive's "The Blackest Beautiful" and "If I'm the Devil", Sons of Kemet's "Your Queen is a Reptile" (good timing for that one), and Linkin Park's "Burning in the Skies" maxi single, which I've only ever seen pop up on ebay twice (the second one being the one I bought) so I'm under the impression that one's rare, and also I love that song.
Did anyone read all this? Probably not, but that's fine! That's the first time I ever wrote this much about music I think. Does anyone find this interesting and would like more? I like talking about music, but most of the time it just ends up as spontaneous, unstructured tweets. But if I don't become too lazy and y'all are interested, I could post longer write-ups on music more regularly I guess, though I'm probably not gonna write 2.5k words again. If you like and wanna chat about any of these artists (especially if you checked them out because I mentioned them), please do! I'd love to chat about this stuff more. Let me know what you and what albums excited you recently