I’m guilty of the common sin of believing that music stopped being any good when I hit my third decade. It doesn’t matter how old you are. When you stopped being young, music stopped being good. Roddy McDowall said it on The Twilight Zone before I was even born: “People are alike everywhere.”
I’ll leave aside the more meaningful implication – that my opinion says more about me than about the music – and get on to a fairly obvious way to address the problem. That is – listen to new music. Listen to a lot of it. Pick the genres that you like and program your streamer of choice to throw some new stuff your way.
For instance – I like ‘80s punk. But I can’t just keep listening to Mission of Burma on a continuous loop no matter how much “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver” may suit my mood these days. With that rather generic advice out of the way, let’s get a bit more specific. Here are three brand spanking new albums for you to check out.
Fresh rock and roll for rotting circumstances
Lord knows we could use a little punk anarchy right about now. You may love or hate the politics of some – well, one – of the bands that follows, but at least acknowledge some of the young musical projects out there are not taking the current state of affairs lying down. And in a world of homogenized, non-threatening art, that at least is a good thing.
No Peeling by No Peeling
Seven songs, eight minutes. Twitchy and wiry, the art punk combo form Nottingham comes across like a fuzzy Wet Leg. Their opening single “Can I Pet That Dog” is an irresistible 55 seconds of joyful noise. They follow it with the spiky pop of “Resuci Annie” about your dream girlfriend which has to be the most enjoyable song about necrophiliac sex dolls this year.
From there, No Peeling dips its toe into the grunge of “Street Feast,” though it doesn’t stay there for more than a couple of seconds. “Band Holiday” is pop that you can actually sing along to. At more than 100 seconds, “Hi Vis” is the most ambitious – a riff on big brother. But they save their best for last, again soaring almost ten seconds past the one-minute mark with “Pink Flamingos,” a clever comment on the way art becomes fodder for the grand commercial enterprise.
Cutthroat by Shame
On their fourth album, Shame gets a little louder and more resolute. The South London quintet has faced a fairly typical conundrum since they released their debut Songs of Praise in 2018. Do they stick with the hard post-punk sound that won them initial acclaim or do they attempt to expand their sound and their songwriting?
Cutthroat navigates this question quite nicely. It is something of a return to that early aggression but with a more polished sense of song. The opening tracks – “Cutthroat” and “Cowards Around” – are full of tuneful bluster, but on “Quiet Life,” they manage a brand of folk punk that is both lyrically and sonically compelling in ways that we haven’t heard.
The rest of the tight 12 tracks bounce from jangly pop (“Spartak”) to the goth post punk drone of “Axis of Evil.” In the middle, one of the standouts is “Limpiao,” a vaguely Brazilian rap saga that pulses along, shifting genres as it progresses.
Not every song breaks new ground, but there’s a lot worth hearing.
Inertia by grandson
It helps to keep the title of Jordan Edward Benjamin’s third album in mind as you make your way through the angry, violent assault of extremely potent hardcore rock and roll. The singer, who performs as “grandson,” has been very vocal in his opinions about the evils of modern capitalism. On tracks like “Self Immolation” and “Who’s the Enemy?”
Benjamin, who is Jewish, makes his feelings about the war in the Middle East very clear. If you need to know more about those feelings, Google Bob Vylan, who performs on the latter track.
Benjamin casts a net that goes well beyond any one hot spot. “Brainrot,” which dropped earlier this summer, takes down commercial culture in one fell swoop. “You Made Me This Way” is a modern rap take on the American Idiot vibe.
“I was born in a country that only thought I mattered
When I was an embryonic sack of cells beside my mother’s bladder..."
pretty much says it all.
“God is an Animal” reinforces the message in case you missed it.
So why does keeping “inertia” in mind matter? Agree or disagree, grandson in screaming for his listeners to take a stand. Hidden in plain sight in almost all of the tracks is the suggestion that the vast majority of people on the planet are just kind of going along to get along, allowing a very small slice of that planet to control and dominate.
I may not agree with the glorification of Aaron Bushnell – the real-life subject of “Self Immolation” – but the call to action is undeniable.
Anyway, if you’re a fan of punk-tinged rock and roll, check out all three of the albums. You’re going to like one, I promise. You might even like all three.