Petaluma, Bay Area. In sunny California four punk rockers founded a band that would be anything but sunny: On Halloween 2003 Love Equals Death was born, blending typical 90s skate punk with Misfits style horror punk. Their 2006 album Nightmerica was released on Fat Wreck Chords and had the band touring with names like TSOL, Avenged Sevenfold, Tiger Army, No Use For A Name, Distillers and of course AFI. Founding member of Love Equals Death included Tsunami Bomb’s Dominic Davi and Tiger Army’s Nick 13. Their approach called “Deathpunk” remained unique and finally returned in 2020 when the band decided to come back to life on a split EP with The Static Age via SBÄM Records and Say-10 Records.
Hitting the studio for a brand new album in this very moment, the band around singer Chon Travis decided to drop a sick compilation on vinyl featuring B-sides and tracks from different labels and even earlier versions of songs on the Nightmerica album. This is going to be out on 29th October, roughly towards Halloween 2021, 18 years after founding the band.
On September 29 they will drop a single coming alongside an exciting video put together from older touring footage. At War (With Myself) is a very personal song that ultimately shows off the band’s qualities and varieties in their musicals style.
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.
KRAYKULLA-WEBZINE 