You’ve probably not heard of The Radio Buzzkills. Chances are, even if you’re a big punk fan, the band have still slipped under your radar. In 2017, the St Louis based band celebrated their fifteenth anniversary and they also achieved a career high point when they shared a stage with one of their all time heroes. In January, they stopped by at Real Gone to tell us all about that soon-to-be legendary gig…and more besides.
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Since the turn of the millennium, a vast amount of music peddled as pop-punk hasn’t resembled the classic pop-punk sound of the nineties at all, but shifted rather more towards whining emo-dom or lightweight post-hardcore. The UK’s As The Sun Sleeps not only play pop-punk in the traditional sense, but are also bloody good at it.
When a band advertises themselves as Ramonescore, you know almost exactly what you’ll get. Four chords, short songs and a fairly carefree attitude, resulting in something that – at best – resembles the second Ramones LP (the peerless ‘Leave Home’), or – at worst – ends up a lo-fi, tossed off approximation of Joey and Johnny that never quite works out. Baltimore’s Canker Blossom are not the best band you’ll ever hear. On the fraudulently titled ‘That’s So Killer’, they’re rarely inspiring.
In the run up to the release of this cassette, Bleeders had been steadily building a following on the live circuit on their home turf of Pennsylvania and the surrounding areas. That sort of makes sense since they have a sound that would surely work much better live; on record, their no-frills, no-wave, distorted, zero budget approach is hellishly ugly. So much so, that it makes label mates The Meltaways seem like a manufactured, multi-million dollar, radio groomed pop rock trio by direct comparison. The recording of ‘Gash’ is so raw and unrelentingly grotesque, it borders on being unlistenable. Looking at it another way, it’s so hard going, that’s an achievement in itself.
We’re nearing the end of the year. It’s been a mixed bag.
2017 is set to begin in style when British punk-pop band As The Sun Sleeps release their new EP in January. It’s one of the best things to come out of the genre in a very long time, equal to classics from early blink-182 and Sum 41. If you can’t wait until the EP release, check out the new video for lead track ‘Beering’. It’s a really catchy track and a good indicator of the quality of the EP.