Shake Appeal is a column that highlights new garage and garage-adjacent releases. It's a huge week: Evan Minsker discusses the latest from Ausmuteants, Manateees, Useless Eaters, Buck Biloxi and the Fucks, Total Heels, and Sheer Mag.
Ausmuteants: Order of Operation/"Fed Through a Tube" [Goner/Total Punk]
"People love conflicts, people love arguments/ People hate melodies, people hate harmonies/ Blow this all up, it couldn't be easier/ And spread the word on your social media." And like that, on their Order of Operation song "Publicity Stunt", Ausmuteants spell out why the ever-churning Internet cycle is destroying the way we view the world. Will art and beauty gain traction on Twitter? Nah. Mark Kozelek using the words "War on Drugs" and "suck my cock" in close proximity, however, will grab people's attention. They amplify this point in the song's lyrics with their own tongue-in-cheek publicity stunt: They namedrop fellow Australian musician Kirin J Callinan, which is probably the most RT-worthy thing in the song.
Sometimes, punk can address the world's ills without feeling preachy or heavy-handed. Ausmuteants send up the way we interact with the Internet, and they do that with their dark wit and deadpan delivery. It also helps that on Order of Operation, they're tighter than they've ever been, making exciting, belligerent punk music for their best album yet (which is saying something; Amusements is great). Also, their new Total Punk single "Fed Through a Tube" rules.
Manateees: Sit n Spin [Pelican Pow Wow]
Even if, for some reason, you want to ignore the hilariously grisly front cover of Manateees' excellent debut album Sit n Spin, the back cover pretty well spells out their vibe: it's a photo of them performing in front of a sheet that reads "FUCK OFF". The Memphis punks, fronted by Abe White, are screaming about "stealin' from the register" and "pissin' on the seat." They've got a ripper here called "Shitwolf". Their track "Earworm", a term often pegged in these pages to mean "familiar and catchy", gives the titlular word a very literal reading. It's skate punk laced with wizard rock, the sort of thing that's so angry and vicious that it could very feasibly make you laugh in the process.
Useless Eaters: Bleeding Moon [Castle Face]
With his huge mass of singles and albums like Daily Commute and C'est Bon!, Useless Eaters' prolific globetrotter Seth Sutton has churned out his fair share of lo-fi, economic punk songs. With last year's Hypertension, he proved himself capable of making an impressive record that had more in common with new wave. He's in San Francisco now and he's made an album for Castle Face that features some of his best songs ever. There's groove-heavy, surf-leaning rock'n'roll like "Sitting on the Fault Line" and the industrial garage stomp of "Aftershock". It's a diverse record, for sure, and a damn good one at that.
Buck Biloxi and the Fucks: Culture Demanufacturer [Total Punk]
On the cover of their great new budget punk 12" Culture Demanufacturer, Buck Biloxi and the Fucks display a huge knife deflating a football. They don't care about the things you love: sports, Shadowrun, church, even rock'n'roll—Buck's got no time for that. "It's a bunch of bullshit anyway," he sings on a song titled "Butthole Bots". It's a Total Punk record that's defiant, disobedient, rude, and awesome. Buck lashes out in all directions, which feels like an appropriate response. See, nobody's making music like Buck and the Fucks, so it makes sense if they're not going to kowtow to anyone's demands, definitions, or false gods. There's a song where he gets in a fight at a dog fight, and hilariously, it takes him until the very last song to say "I Might Flip Out". Might?
Sheer Mag: 7" [Wilsuns RC]
It's a wonderful thing when something like this Sheer Mag 7" finds its way in your inbox. An unbelievably strong four-song power pop EP doesn't plummet into view very often. This one merits attention not because it's loud and raucous, but because the songwriting here is exceptional. The Philadelphia band find these simple vocal hooks tailor-made to get lodged in your brain (the "ay-yay-yay-yeah" line in "Point Breeze", especially). The guitar work, too, is stellar; all four songs here are ridiculously catchy. A great debut, for sure.
Total Heels: Total Heels [Like Literally]
At first glance, there's something unclassifiable about the vocals on the new self-titled full-length by Copenhagen punks Total Heels. They're not screamed or full-on sung. They're half-spoken, which somehow adds urgency to the words here. "I think we lost it on the kitchen tile," they say before ushering in a bunch of jagged guitars and some organ. Then again, it's an LP that occasionally resembles mid-1980s classic rock. They can go big and dramatic, they're not afraid to slow that organ way down for a ballad, and on "It's Alright If You Keep Moving", they let you know that they prefer their beers in cups.
Matthew Melton: "Words I Never Learned"
Guitar hero Matthew Melton already released one very stellar album this year: Warm Soda's swooning power pop opus Young Reckless Hearts. On November 18th, he's got a solo album coming out via Southpaw called Outside of Paradise. Here's a blue screen video for one of the album's tracks:
Hey, I wanted to take a second to note that this week marks the one-year anniversary of me writing Shake Appeal; next week, I'll have done 50. Putting these together has been a lot of fun. Thanks for reading.