Formed during the first Coronavirus lockdown of 2020, Toronto’s Imploders crank out classic sounding hardcore in a very early 80s style. In just five songs, their debut release is hard, fast and brutal, and often far better than your average DIY thrash-punk. Despite an unfussy approach, there’s nothing about the material that seems cheap or wantonly trashy. Quite the opposite, in fact; it’s almost as if every note has been put together with the underlying thought of how Keith Morris, Ian MacKaye and John Doe might’ve approached things. In short, this debut delivers six minutes of the most perfect hardcore; a sharp set of sounds that are absolutely guaranteed to thrill lovers of the style.
Tag Archives: punk
SCUM – For Health And Well-Being EP
It’s brave move to open a release with a spoken word passage, especially for a band who are barely out of the starting blocks in terms of their career, but Scum come in with such confidence on their second EP – and a semi-pretentiousness – that it makes the listener wonder what else they’ve got up their collective sleeve. “The primal scream of the modern team”, sneers a very natural sounding voice, before being particularly scathing of modern TV and its watchers who “do not see what they need”. It all sounds very jaded for a band whom, at the time of recording, appear to have a combined age that’s less than a third of Jello Biafra’s own.
EL TUERTO WILLY – Vamonos!
Argentinian punks El Tuerto Willy are no strangers to a cover tune or two. On their earlier releases, they can be heard hammering through tunes by NOFX, Rancid, Sublime and Elton John (often in Spanish), but in terms of all round entertainment value, their 2021 digital EP ‘Vamonos!’ tops the lot.
DAS KAPITANS – Debut
For those who were paying attention to the UK indie rock/punk underground during those periods of pandemic lockdown during 2020 and ’21, the name Das Kapitans will be a familiar one. As the world slowly ground to a halt, the band went into recording overdrive by releasing twelve albums’ worth of material at a rate that would’ve made Guided By Voices man Robert Pollard seem lazy.
Their 2022 release ‘Debut’, then, isn’t a debut in the true sense; nor does it mean that the band consider their dozen lo-fi Bandcamp releases in anyway unofficial or unimportant. The title comes from the fact that it’s actually the first Das Kapitans disc to be recorded “properly”, with far more care – and with all of the band members present at all times. This gives the album an extra level of professionalism, but those who’ve already taken the time to explore the band’s rapidly assembled catalogue and fallen for its ragged and noisy charms needn’t worry about this being too polished. Yes, in many ways, the material sounds better, but it never really loses any of the band’s rough and ready spirit, and the expected big riffs are still at the forefront of the best material.
AL PACINOS SISTER – DOGZ EP
In February 2020, Al Pacinos Sister (no punctuation) released ‘Trained In Karate’, a no-frills, no holds barred hardcore punk EP that valued speed and noise over almost everything else. The result was like experiencing a raw garage band tapping into the earliest wares from the Dischord label. Obviously, what the songs lacked in finesse they made up for with sheer balls, leaving behind the kind of lightning fast punky blast that seemed almost timeless.