Monday 7 July 2014

Hits From The Box #84 - Budget Squats


Man I hate the government. Idiots. Scum. But I'm not about politics, I'm about music. So let's keep things loud and fucked and see what trouble we can find yeah? First Hits From The Box in months, incidentally...


Glaswegian scuzzbuckets The Amazing Snakeheads are a demonic maelstrom of anger, devilish glee and tearing the fabric of sound, all whilst keeping the noise in some mould of accessibility, with some baritone sax in there to give you a taste of what Morphine could have been if they were called Amphetamine instead. Fitting, as their album is called Amphetamine Ballads, and the Scots are kinetic, sweat sticking to the roof of your mouth-levels of anarchic intensity. It's bloody great, and you don;t need to be spat in the face to realise it - but no one minds if they do it anyway, right?





Beechwood are a New York garage rock band that love to dirty things up tenfold, and freak the fuck out. Their upcoming LP is called Trash Glamour, and I can't think of a better way to describe them. It is so red-line dirty in fact that you can't help but think this would be the perfect soundtrack for a drug-fuelled makeout session with an ambiguous tattooed beauty whilst disappearing in a pit of grease and oil. Slightly serrated and wholly debased.





Homebody is a cleaner unit but no less fun. Hailing from Denver and counting members from  SM faves School Knights (RIP?), they harbour the laconic, languid jams that the likes of Women or Mac Demarco might deliver, if they pilfered from each others' playbooks. I love the sun-under-water percolation of 'Embroidery' for example. Homebody is a great EP that I hope spirals out into something more substantial - and sooner the better. Their first show was supporting No Age, so yeah, there's that too.




Need some frantic frenetic space guitar jammed in your earholes to block out the voices in your head? Spirit the Cosmic Monster from within - or at least these guys from New Jersey, an instrumental act clearly eating the root of archaic mental stimulation and mind explosions. These tracks are heady, heavy, intense yet still a lot of fun - rifftastic, riotous, ridiculous - but goddamned rad too.



It makes sense to jam a Castle Face release in here. POW! are a kinda ridiculous, phaser-wave, sci-fi meltdown garage three-piece from San Francisco - hence the attraction. It's goddamn weird yet eerily accessible - the soundtrack to an alien abduction from a species more interested in herbal ingestion, out of body experiences and party poppers. How can something come across as dorky, weird and imminently cooler than anything else going on? Celestial beings caught in the gamma rays of 50s D grade exploitation moon people pictures, that's who. Bow down to the new masters of the universe ('Cyber Attack'!!!). Grab Hi-Tech Boom in excellent "wasp guts" vinyl (yellow one side, black the other) here.



Let's finish with some Aussie noise courtesy of Melbourne noiseos Dry Mouth. Their 7" Gone Troppo is the kind of weirdnik static drone meanderings that I find imminently interesting, and continually grow out of the abscesses of the Australian undergrowth. Its oddly beautiful in its bubbling ooze, with enough space and oddity to fall into the gaps and disappear blissfully. Sometimes that's all you want to do to get by, really. The quietest inclusion on this list, but in some ways the most chaotic and disturbing - yet also easy to embrace and enjoy.


Happy Monday Everyone!!!

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