I watched Teenage Bottlerocket twice during last four years play live and they destroyed it both times, being one of the best live bands I have ever witnessed. I met Ray and Kody and they are both down to Earth nice guys and I was very happy when I heard their new full length album is out with Fat. This time they offer twelve songs of their recognizable melodic punk rock, Ramonescore the subgenre of punk they helped give birth to and quite a number of bands play it now. That means, beautiful dual vocals of guitarists Ray and Kody, superb melodies and fantastic catchy up tempo punk songs like Ramones delivered decades ago. It is hard to say which songs I prefer because all of them are so great, but if I must, I would say that would be Youre Never Going Out Of Style, Hello Dana and Moving On. This band is so close to my heart that it is really hard to write objective review, but damn it, this is my zine, so I can write about what I like and dont give a flying f..k about it. This is for sure one of the best punk rock releases this year.
Time for a band from our own scene to grace the pages of this webzine, namely ŠIZA from Koprivnica, Croatia. I recently witnessed show of this band at 3FF festival in our hometown and it blew me away as one of the absolute highlights of this festival. This band are only two guys, Bruno and Marko. Bruno plays bass and sings, Marko is drummer. Music when played live sounds so powerful like there is whole five members band on stage. These guys played and still play in many bands and projects of our scene, but let us concentrate on this one. Music of Šiza is a mixture of energetic punk, garage punk, noise and post punk and although this sounds a bit pretentious, it is not, believe me. There are uptempo straight forward punk songs, and more slower rolling apocalyptic songs, but songwriting is complex and beautiful with atmosphere being very dark for me as a listener, angry too. Lyrics are in Croatian and I am very happy about that, since most bands in our country nowadays use only English. Lyrics are smart, one of the best I have read in a while, personal but also thematically lead to some of the burning problems, like survival, violence, mental health, egoism and more. This band is what our scene needed and this is for sure one of the best releases this year to come out of Croatian underground.
Chicago s favorite sons are back with new record! Naked Raygun are punk rock veterans and I am glad to still see them go and sounding strong after all these years and still causing a whirlwind, real storm of emotions with their melodic old school pop punk rock. This new bunch of songs has something for everyone, from sweet chorus of Treat Me Unkind that I love so much, to almost psyched ending of Soul Hole Baby, across haunting, atmospheric noisy and garage rock Suicide Bomb, pure unaldurated punk fun of Broken Things, this album is very versatile using punk rock as it was meant to be, as a means of creativity in song writing and making a whole new world of sound for us listeners to enjoy. I can almost smell the sweaty, smoke filled garage and club full of punks listening to this band and let Naked Raygun take you to otherworldly experience of rock. Nice album.
KRAYKULLA-WEBZINE 