TEENAGE BUBBLEGUMS – Infamia EP

In a pre-lockdown age, Italian punks Teenage Bubblegums hit their audience with a sound that blended huge influences from the early Ramones catalogue with the musical prowess of a couple of 90s Fat Wreck bands. That approach really came of age when the band cranked out ten numbers in under fifteen minutes on their 2019 “long player” ‘In Limbo’. The record’s chunky riffs and dual male/female vocal created something tough yet melodic, sharing something that could be enjoyed by a broad spectrum of Europunk fans.

Five years on, the ‘Infamia’ EP presents a much more mature and rather different sounding band. Allowing themselves room to stretch out, the five featured tracks take almost as long to play through as twice as many songs from the Bubblegums’ past, but the band’s command of a riff is still great.

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RUDIMENTARY PASTE – Six Examples Of The Wilhelm Scream EP

Affiliated with the independent Socks On Records, Rudimentary Paste are label mates with brilliant noise makers Das Kapitans, Get The Fuck Outta Dodge, Al Pacinos Sister, and Soviet Films. That fact alone will give some listeners a reasonable idea of what to expect from the band’s ‘Six Examples of The Wilhelm Scream’ EP before even going in. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but even though this band actually features a couple of faces associated with other Socks On acts, the Paste sound isn’t just a carbon copy of their peers.

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HOT FIENDS – Cult Supreme EP

Brighton’s Hot Fiends aren’t shy of a massive riff. Nor are they afraid of a sharp edged vocal. Their sound is much broader than a lot of other DIY punks, however, and on their debut EP ‘Cult Supreme’, they deliver some truly abrasive noises. In their own words, the music represents “a sonic slap”; for those keen to apply easy labels, it’s fair to say its five tunes take in hardcore punk traditions and splice the speed with bits of extreme post-metal, but the material also finds time to explore some genuinely uncompromising noise rock. When chucked in a giant musical blender, it ends up sounding much closer to a very confident post-hardcore racket, but the five tracks are anything but predictable.

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THE REAL GONE SINGLES BAR #33

Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar! For our first SB feature of ’24, we’ve dug deeply into our inbox of mp3s and assorted goodies to bring you another round of quick fire entertainment in our usual style. You’ll find the usual variety, with a dose of melodic punk, some alt country, huge rock and even some progressive black metal to tempt you. With January traditionally being a little quieter for submissions, we’ve taken the opportunity to include a couple of older tunes here that didn’t get covered during the last weeks of 2023, but that doesn’t mean a dip in quality. After all, you can’t put a sell by date on great music! As always, if you feel you have something of interest that you feel would suit a future Singles Bar – or a full review – at Real Gone, please don’t hesitate to get in touch…

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MIRA – Mira EP

Emo. Originally shorthand for emotional hardcore and practised by melodic hardcore bands like Youth of Today, Rites of Spring et al, by the beginning of the twenty first century, anything labelled emo couldn’t be further away from those origins. There was a spell in the mid 90s where alternative rock bands with a slight indie leaning were also labelled emo (the best of which were the much missed Sense Field and the short-lived Shift) and they were great, but beyond that, emo just became a lazy tag for “whining sub-goth naval gazing with floppy fringe”. Surely, somewhere in the US, Brendan Canty wonders what the hell happened?

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