Wash Pet Rocks With Healing Crystals, Get Drunk, Eat Sun, Figure It Out

A ridiculously long title, me marrying up the band's first three cuts from their album...ah well. It;s the first week of 2016, and already there's an Exploding In Sound roster album to look forward to. Brooklyn duo Washer are finally prepped to bring out their debut LP, Here Comes Washer, in the latter stages of this month (you can pre-order limited edition orange vinyl here). Like many of the excellent albums on EIS, Washer specialise in grunged out guitar rock that cracked, bent, cryptic, hilarious, garrulous, gritty. The instrumentation and Mike Quigley's vocal delivery immediately evokes Pile, EIS' flagship band (in my opinion anyway). the new one, 'Got Drunk And Ate The Sun', has been launched on Stereogum today, and the other two are below. Look at the plain, naive art weirdness of the cover art too - if you haven't taken in how this is already pushing to be a big album around these here parts, listen harder.

Flagging Down Exploding Washers

I first came across Brooklyn's Washer last year when they put out a fine split with excellent four-piece Big Ups. Now here they are again, this time on a split alongside Flagland (whose 3rd album Love Hard I wrote about here) who have also featured on a split with Big Ups - the triangle is complete. The 7" starts with Flagland's unhinged pop - playing out like the serrated moments of early Modest Mouse, fronted by a young Tim Rogers of You Am I fame. But there was something about the frenetic guitar pop abandon of Washer's 'Joe' that truly grabbed me. It is less than two minutes of seemingly innocuous pop-flecked punk abandon, but the precision stop/start gaps and yowls in the final third, the growl of the guitars - it all points to something much more rabid. Preorder the split here.

Some Missed Posts from 2014 - Big Ups

Last month got hectic, and I wrote a bunch of posts that I didn't get around to actually posting. So because I want to clean house and I actually spent time doing them and want them out there - this Sunday will be post that slipped through the cracks day!

New York four-piece Big Ups are starting to become a common fixture on my playlist these days. Ever since Paul and Ani, two good friends and past writers/co-founders of Sonic Masala, mentioned seeing them earlier this year (and they were one of the many acts that fell foul of ATP with THAT festival back in August), the band’s abrasive, literate, garrulously visceral punk offensive has been a minor obsession for me. (Seeing as one of my favourite albums of 2014 has been Detroit maulers Protomartyr’s Under Color Of Official Right, this shouldn’t surprise you really) I’ve attempted to write about it and them a number of times over the past four months, but like a great many half-concocted ideas, it has languished, falling farther down the totem pole, getting crisp on the backburner.



Then I heard ‘Not Today’, and my mind slipped another gear their album from the beginning of the year, Eighteen Hours of Static, was a maelstrom of ferocity and exorcised humane vitriol, a diatribe aimed at the world at large, spat out in all manner of obtuse and lugheaded ways, and this universality proved its searing, charismatic throughline. Like Protomartyr frontman Joe Casey’s baritone barbed-yet-acerbic lyrics, or Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson’s evangelised gutter gnashing, or Parquet Courts’ Andrew Savage’s slacker ennui spun as ocular literature, Big Ups’ Joe Galarraga seemed in tune with the 21st century intelligentsia, literati, proles and serfs – not just proffering a self-aggrandising roar for self-purification and perceived entitlement then, but an angular attempt to connect, to reveal, to revel.