punk

Do you have tickets yet for the garage punk gig of the year? It's on in Sydney this Saturday night and you can buy a ticket for Born Out Of Time #1 here. All pre-sales will receive a free CD of bands playing the series of bills.

Presented by Off The Hip Records and I-94 Bar., the first of a swries of shows will feature Grindhouse, The Crusaders, The Beat Taboo, Aberration and The Devours. Make a beeline for Marrickville Bowling Club. Doors open at 7pm and the event runs until 1am.   

Flash House are from London and play thrashy but articulate gutter punk. The Scandis and various bands from Australia and the American Midwest perfected this style in the early ’90s. They just weren’t as hirsute.

Sometimes you wonder why the English didn’t achieve more prominence in the trash-punk field while grunge was cutting a swathe, but they were buried under all that Britpop nonsense. Fuck me, I mean, Oasis were less a band than a series of Beatles songs masquerading as headlines. Flash House and their ilk are making up for lost time.

In these times of limited attention spans and information overload, every band needs a tagline. A way to be noticed. Flash House’s is: “Rock ’n’ roll dystopia. Fast songs played by slow minds”. It fits like a thumb in your bum.

So I Could Have Them Destroyed – The Hard-Ons (Music Farmers)

We need to talk. Oh, yes, we do.

There were doubts about this one. I’d seen the songs played live. Whether it was unfamiliarity or just an off night, to these ears the set didn’t gel. It cried out for more light and less shade. Ease off that pedal-to-the-metal thing, baby. Not in a greatest hits way, but maybe with the odd well-chewed pop bone thrown in. It wasn’t bad. Just not earth shattering.

Then the album arrived and hit the disc player.

Fark.

US-based punk-metal duo-turned-trio BugGIRL! are heading home to play a handful of shows in Australia in February and unleash a new album.

With a band on it called Guitar Fucker, it has to be a winner. “Punch Me Hard” is a compilation CD from Burning Sound in Switzerland and it’s 15 tracks of garage and punk rock, with touches of swampy blues rock ’n’ roll, that fucking burns.

What a vibrant and rocking scene those Swiss fuckers have going on over there…it must be those very liberal ways of living? This CD reminds me of listen to Kev Lobotomi on PBS Radio in Melbourne or being at a Fred Negro gig. It’s interesting, diverse and who knows what’s coming next.

Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne (aka King Buzzo) is headed to Australia for a 10-date solo acoustic tour of Australia in August. With a career spanning 31 years, 30 albums, and over 2,000 live performances, this tour marks the first time that the monarch of metal has performed acoustically in intimate settings.

Way Out West Book Promo Advert from George Matzkov on Vimeo.

It’s high time somebody wrote a book about the heyday of Perth’s underground music scene. Powerpop label (Zero Hour) operator and publisher George Matzkou is doing something about it.

Matzkou has launched a crowdfunding campaign to produce a comprehensive history and limited edition companion CD. “Way Out West” will cover Perth bands from the 1976-89 era.

Paying attention? This album by a band from local serial killer capital Adelaide that hardly anyone outside Australia will have heard of celebrates obscene volume, filthy guitar sounds and a blaring bottom end. For these reasons alone, you should love it.

It’s an entirely name-worthy pairing: Los Angeles’ best punk rock and roll band, The Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs, are teaming with Dead Boys guitar legend Cheetah Chrome to hit the road in the USA.

Coming out of Melbourne with long-player number two, Kit Convict & Thee Terrible Two have come up with a great little album. It’s full of jangly guitar riffs, a huge drum sound and a fabulous bass player holding down its bottom end and keeping it as tight as a cat’s arsehole.

I’ll tell you now that they did not fuck around with the recording of “Cobra’s Blood”. It was all written by the band, recorded in two days (the 12th & 13th of March this year, to be precise) at the wonderful Sound Park Studios in little old Northcote. Mastered by Mikey Young, it's an album that grows and grows on you. Exactly as was intended.

A West Indian, a Frenchman, a Japanese, a Welshman and a Mexican walk into a bar…it might sound like the opening of an old joke but it's more likely just King Salami & The Cumberland 3 turning up for a pre-gig soundcheck. The London-based five-piece (names can be deceptive) are are a frat band version of the United Nations - only not useless - with enough recycling going on to start a chain of environmentally-friendly chain stores.

The rock and roll family tree of Lower East Side garage rodent Kevin K is enough to cause even Pete Frame heartburn, the past quarter century and change a revolving door of true believers like Aunt Helen, The Toys, The Road Vultures, Trash Brats, Freddy Lynxx and The Corner Gang, The Kevin K Band, The Real Kool Kats, and now The Hollywood Stars. Along the way, he’s shared a thousand clammy club gigs with various Ramones, Dolls, Heartbreakers, and Dead Boys, shoring up a curriculum vitae that doesn’t really call for a cover letter.

Here's the European edition of the twice-repressed album from Melbourne band Bits of Shit. The message is simple: If you haven't nailed a copy of the Australian version on Homeless, there's still hope.

Jello-less since 2001, the Dead Kennedys are bringing their brand of seminal punk back to Australian audiences, 25 years since they first hit our shores and th first time since 2014. 

The band - these days that's East Bay Ray, D.H. Peligro, Klaus Flouride and singer Skip McSkipster - is doing a quick hit-and-run of four shows in a week.  

The Dead Kennedys had a huge impact in Australia in the 1980s. Their albums - “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables”, “In God We Trust, Inc”, “Plastic Surgery Disasters”, “Frankenchrist”  and “Bedtime for Democracy” – sold by the thousand at a time when punk had yet to break into the mainstream, and kept selling big numbers for decades.

If it feels like Kevin K albums are falling out of the sky like rain, remember that we're in a rock and roll drought, compared to the '70s and '80s. The walls are closing in, not tumbling down and we need stuff like this like Kim Fowley needs fame. So be thankful for another small mercy and the 18th studio effort under the Kevin K moniker.

Fessin' up first: I didn't much like "Dickcheese" when it originally came out in 1988. You didn't need liner notes to hear the overt heavy metal influences. The album swung from catchy punk-pop with buried melodies to bottom-heavy stoner riffing. There was no lack of energy but the mix sounded muddy and bore little resemblance to the sound of the Hard-Ons live. Many years down the track and all that stylistic bouncing around makes much more sense.

This band goes back to 1983. They split up and re-animated themselves in 2005. The album itself dropped in 2010, and is worth moving heaven and earth to procure. If someone told you a tough rock and roll band with swagger to rival the New Christs came from Glasgow, would you believe them? Och, aye. Wake up and smell the thistles.

_{James Baker and Joe Bludge: The Painkillers.} 

The name James Baker is synonomous with Australian garage rock. His musical exploits read like a who’s who of legendary Australian music – one third of legendary Perth proto-garage punk outfit The Victims, original drummer (and songwriter) with the garage pop incarnation of The Scientists, skinsman in the first (and best) line-up of Le Hoodoo Gurus, founding member of Australia’s best known rock supergroup, the Beasts of Bourbon and drummer with the sadly underappreciated Dubrovniks.

Ya gotta put things in context. If The Spazzys hadn't made an effervescent pop-punk classic in 2004's "Aloha! Go Bananas", we'd all be praising "Dumb Is Forever" as one of the most righteous and infectious debut albums of 2012. They did and it isn't but it's still a pretty good effort.

Australian trio the Cosmic Psychos is fast filling the yawning void of relentless punk rock consistency left vacant by the Ramones' departure. Which isn't to say they're a replacement for Da Bruddas, by any means, but If The Song Ramones the Same, then Psychos Never Sleep. Expect no quantum leaps with "Dung Australia", their first long player in a year, and you'll be happy as a pig in, er, dung.