Dead Bambies - Dandelion Session (Thomas Imposter)

There's so much great stuff coming out of Japan at the moment and the Thomas Imposter label is home to some of the best of it.  Dead Bambies unquestionably qualify for inclusion in that category: their frenzied guitar attack has launched many welcome assaults on my ears in the last few years and I hope and trust there will be many more to come.

This session was broadcast in my Dandelion Radio show in September 2018 and it's great to see it getting an official release via TI.  Not only that, but the four session tracks are augmented here by a further three previously unreleased tracks: you can hear one of them, Taste of Honey, in my show this month. 

It's available to download from the Thomas Imposter Bandcamp site.  Get a copy here.   Also, listen out for their labelmates The Jungles!!! whose brilliant debut session can be heard in my show this month.

Leach - Leach

 

Long-time readers of this blog and listeners to my Dandelion Radio show may well remember my fondness for a Minneapolis band called Ugly Motors, who took a standard garage format and imbued it with something very different with the result that they sounded very little like anyone else.

Wade, bassist with Ugly Motors, got in touch to tell me about a new band he's in called Leach, and I'm very glad he did.  Their self-titled EP showcases a group in some ways very different from UM, but in some ways quite similar.  There's a formula here, and a healthy desire to fuck with it, that's entirely in keeping with that earlier band's approach; except the formula's different and at times Leach fuck with it to within an inch of its life.

Opener 'The High Cost of Low Wages', for instance, is a high-octane screamer, fuelled by the larynx of the brilliantly named Jumpin' James Jordan.  Musically, though, there's a quiet sophistication that play beneath the sub-hardcore façade.  Such low-key experimentalism reveals itself steadily over the EP, in the frantic tempo changes of '#2', for instance, or 'Family Vacation', where a stunted, brooding opening ill-prepares you for the explosion of sound, quasi-militaristic snare work and raging guitars that occurs mid-track, before we're back again, grinding to a slow-churning close.

Don't get me wrong: whatever sophistication or experimentation is present within Leach is of a subdued kind, offering thrilling variations on a format that's never allowed to become sterile or predictable.  There's a love for the format evident too, however, which is at least as important in making this release such a joy to listen to.

The EP's available for free here.  I suggest you get it.

Unqualified Nurse - Bad Taste Reaction

The world wasn't crying out for another competent yet formulaic garage rock band of the kind whose material and links frequent my inbox week after week.  It was, however, screaming the place down for the kind of thing Unqualified Nurse do - caustic, feedback-drenched tunes with a whiff of the atonal and a structure that holds together defiantly despite, it seems, the entire band pulling away from it in different directions.

This Derby- based band had already served notice of their attempt to disrupt a scene that was getting far too cosy with their Let Snarl album, released back in January.  Now, this EP has appeared on their bandcamp site to emphasise even further the naked power married to experimental zeal of a band who certainly stand as one of the most interesting things 2015 has managed to unearth.

None of the five songs makes it past the 1:16 mark yet within each nugget of sound exists a beguiling, twisted noise that remains a part of your head long after the brief encounter has elapsed.  The EP's longest track, 'Welcome to Fear City/Erratic Van' is a sludgy, grinding gem of a tune, awash in a wind tunnel of circling noise and deviant guitars while 'Myth Generator', which I'm playing in my Dandelion Radio show this month, begins with a discordant guitar whirl and buzzes around your head like a wasp's nest you disturbed: the stings bite into your brain but you don't care.

And they've made it NYOP at bandcamp so there's no excuse for your life to remain undisturbed by this glorious racket for a moment longer.  Get it here. 

Ugly Motors - S/T

Ugly Motors are from Minneapolis and they describe what they do as 'shit-faced rock'. It's a pretty accurate description.

The difference between really really good garage bands and run-of-the-mill ones (and there are plenty of the matter) lies in how much they're willing to cede the floor to their guitars.  The guitarists can't ponce around, they can't show off and they can't pretend it's about them rather than the instruments.

 

In Ugly Motors, duelling guitarists Joe and Wade know this.  If they can play - and it sounds like they can - then thankfully they're the kind of fretwork manipulators who understand you've got to let the instruments have their say. In short, they come on not - thank God - as budding Carlos Santanas but as more what Santana might have sounded like if you'd cut off his fingers after the first album. There's struggle to be heard in these tunes, and out of it comes some of the most glorious garage rock I've heard in a long long time.  Lying on top of those guitars, Joe's vocals have that Kingsmen-esque mumbling quality which mean you can't hear exactly what he's singing about but you know it ain't pretty.

As for the tunes on their self-titled mini-album, 'Fart Party' isn't the sub-Queers festival of lavatorial humour you might expect from its title; rather it's how The Strokes might sound if they were any good. It's got a riff to die for, as has album closer - and, at four minutes-plus a veritable epic in this generally truncated company - 'Your Face Is A Door'. But the album's best riff is reserved for the two-minute slab of depravity that is 'Sexmother'. In fact, it's the best guitar riff of the year so far. I've played the track in my March Dandelion Radio Show, but secretly I'd love to have that descending guitar run as my theme tune, if I had one.

 

You can get this release from their bandcamp site.  It's name your price for the download, or you can get a cassette copy (hand made with hate and a dash of bourbon in every case, according to the band) for a minimum price of just $3.   Limited to thirty copies in this format, so you might want to get there quickly.