punk

Stress Dolls Queen of No (Sun Pedal Recordings) Queen of No, the new Stress Dolls album, lives up to the band name. It is a journey through head Stress Doll Chelsea O’Donnell’s anxieties, ranging from health issues (she suffers from Crohn’s Disease), relationships, social media and more existential questions. Though the music is firmly based in pop-punk, a variety of styles illuminate the various themes which run through the album. In general, the more declarative songs — where she directly...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Leave Us A Loan Picture Disc reissue by The Low Budgets. Alright, the fact is that not every punk rock record is golden. Any fan of the music can begrudgingly admit that, and every fan should – because it is the definition or critical thinking. The first step to truly appreciating any music genre is recognizing that some shit is exactly that; it’s shit. That’s how we differentiate between poor records...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Drowns’ Blacked Out LP. While the number of ways that a band may choose to change their sound in the name of refreshing it or updating it are almost innumerable, what The Drowns have done on Blacked Out is genuinely impressive. This time out, the band has left most of the punk and hardcore are forms that the band has been developing and refining over the last few years behind and...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the For Family And Flag Volume 2 LP. While it took a little longer for Pirates Press to return to their For Family and Flag series than anyone likely expected , there’s no question that the label couldn’t have picked a more opportune time or angle of approach for a return, as one scans the track list on For Family And Flag...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Complicators’ self-titled album. While it’s very easy for any critic to come off as surprised when a band reassembles a set of well-used, time-honored musical cliches and presents something which works, it’s far more difficult to find the flaw which ultimately causes that very familiar structure to fall apart and/or come off as completely irredeemable.How does one do it? How does one point to the problem which ultimately caused the house...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the This Is How Democracy Dies LP by Brigata Vendetta. Okay, after the last few years of pundits both educated and ill-informed questioning the health and longevity of democracy and looking at the concept so closely the eye-strain could easily be attributable to a migraine, the idea of another punk band stepping forward to declare, “Us too!” is almost laughable enough to drive this critic into a stress-induced mental breakdown. Happily though,...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Vapids’ Revenge Therapy LP. Beyond a certain point, it’s understandable how fans of any given punk band lower their expectations of new albums, when they’re announced. Part of that might have to do with the age of the band playing a role; whether they admit it or not, fans of four-chord punk expect the bands making the music to be young and snotty. It could be argued that such is the...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Crisis Actor LP by Billy Liar. It feels unlikely on the surface because, like Henry Ford, punks often want to proclaim that, “history is bunk” – but the fact is that some of the permutations of punk rock that have passed through the mainstream are possessed of an undeniably accessible quality. Even on first listen, sometimes there’s just something about the music which is capable of hooking listeners really really hard...

WHO: NOT WHAT: Stop the World WHY: I did not think Stop the World would make such an impact on me, mostly because I didn’t think I could ever get used to the vocals. I still don’t think I like the vocals, but Stop the World sounds like a love letter to ALL; every note, every guitar solo, every melody, every tone. For someone starving for new ALL material (“two new albums, one instrumental”), this album is a reminder of...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Dwarves’ Concept Album LP. To say that The Dwarves have been around and weathered a lot of pop cultural storms is an understatement. Since forming in Chicago in the mid-Eighties, The Dwarves have reinvented the concept of the revolving door; they’ve gone through band members (dozens of them – but guitarist Pete “HeWhoCannotBeNamed” Vietnamecheque and singer Paul “Blag Dahlia” Cafaro are the group’s core members), record labels (at least five) and...