Scissorfight - American Cloven Hoof Blues

Label: Eccentric Man, Tortuga
Year: 2001

Weird beard boogie thud skuzz. Through and through dirt rock damage for your next monster truck jam pre-party. If you're the kind of guy who has Bondo visible on your daily driver, or you've had your fork lift operator's license revoked for disciplinary reasons, or your girlfriend owns three or more exotic reptiles...then Scissorfight speak your language. Your garbled, low frequency, insistent language.
The Clutch record you've wanted to hear since 1994.

DL

Hot Wives - Eat Your Enemies

Label: Blood Drunk
Year: 2016

Looking for affirmation: do I like this?
I think I do. It seems like I've been enjoying it now for the last little while.
Kind of reminds me of another Atlanta band (Hot Wives are from Atlanta, sorry if I didn't mention that earlier) The Tom Collins in that they take a noise rock/grunge template, but then run it through some straight rock-n-roll swagger (but less Led Zeppelin worship). Sort of like something that might have come out of New York City in the independent music feeding frenzy of 1993; a Surgery with bits of Barkmarket and bits of Action Swingers, and an FM radio in the background playing Billy Squire. I mean, Mudhoney gets away with going straight up rock sleaze sometimes, why can't Hot Wives?

Pretty sure that the more I listen, the more I really like it. But you listen, and you tell me if it's good.

DL

Oneida - Secret Wars

Label: Jagjaguwar
Year: 2003

Do you have bands that you really love, but you somehow forget about them for long stretches of time, and then, when you are reacquainted, you're all "got dayum, why come I no remember to love these?!"?
Rhetorical question, because I'm really only concerned with myself. And I do. Oneida is one of those bands.
They are uniquely focused as a band on a propulsive version of psych rock groove, that makes their musically distinctly "theirs". With very few exceptions, from the first ten seconds of one of their songs, (if you are previously familiar...or biblically familiar with the band), you'll be nodding your head and thinking, "dang dude...that Oneida. I should really stop forgetting about this shit". The hammering rhythmic repetition crawls inside your brain-holes to lay eggs of twitchy drone damage (the incubation period on those eggs is roughly four minutes, but whatever larvae hatch seem harmless and pass out of your body [assuming via the butthole, but I assume pretty much everything {babies} emerge from "down under"] with no ill effect. Just some head bobbing.

Looking forward to "rediscovering" Oneida again in a year or so.

DL

Bluebird - Falling Back To Earth

Label: Dim Mak
Year: 2003

Here's the sound of a band swinging for the fences in an effort to "break through". Pulling out all the stops and going full on Post-Grunge-Alternative-Rock. But we wouldn't talk about it here unless it was good, right (locker room talk)?
I think it's good.
If you followed the trajectory of the band then this record is not much a deviation from the 'Hot Blood' that immediately preceded it, not surprisingly as this ep is essentially a single built around 'Hot Blood' lead-off track "Falling Back To Earth".
If you're in the mood for big rock songs, this one will do the trick.
And if it helps, they recruited Pete Stahl (Scream, Goatsnake, Earthlings?, Wool) and Shelby Cinca (Frodus, Black Sea, Decahedron) to guest on the final track, which is a rollicking punk rave-up that bleeds around the edges.

DL

Harmacy - For The Mentally Ill

Label: self released
Year: 2018

Hardcore bluster tempered with post punk's nervy swagger. Like, can you imagine if Bauhaus had been lifting weights instead of reading books? Picking fights in their pancake makeup.
Here's another Atlanta band doing what needs to be done. Five quick songs that do damage and slide out the backdoor before the cops can arrive on scene. Ugly and proud. Warped and wooly.

Really good. I'm feeling pretty confident about your chances with this one. If you're getting busy with anybody in the vein of (I'm trying to think of new shit) Metz, Illegal Drugs, Uniform, The Men, Iceage, Pissed Jeans, Vincas, USA Nails, Wailin' Storms, So Pitted, Ceremony, or something...then you'll get it.

DL

Fistula - Hymns Of Slumber

Label: Shifty
Year: 2001

The corroded hull of shipwrecked powerviolence stocked with barrel upon barrel of southern sludge violence, blackening the sugar sands of a once pristine beach playground. Everything dies.
Death by poison boogie hammer strike.


DL