Words by Jim Testa
Jim Testa founded the highly influential zine, Jersey Beat in 1982 which he continues to edit to this day. Through writing for his own publication and a number of other outlets, including as a staff writer for Hudson County’s Jersey Journal, he has championed local, regional and national up-and-coming bands. Punk has always shunned credentials, but rest assured that Jim won’t lead you astray.
GRAND SLAM
MINOT – Down & Out At The Thunderbird (self-released)
Minot, a feisty trio from Missoula, Montana, split the difference between an Appalachian hootenanny and a basement punk show on their sophomore album. Flora Holland and Alex Molica split lead vocals and both play guitar (with some bass from Alex too). Together with drummer Noah MacKinnon (a graduate of the Tommy Ramone School of 4/4 Beats), they make a clattery, messy but irrepressible impression, punctuated by barnyard yowls and X-Ray Spex shrieks that let you know that whatever the hell it is they’re singing about, they mean it. The band goes full psychobilly on “Hipshake,” (as in, “do the Hipshake, baby,”) a bit of primal chooglin’ with a cheesy keyboard and more tremolo than an earthquake. Flora’s vocal on “Cry, Cry, Cry” invokes classic country tropes, “Night Time” revisits Nuggets-era psych-garage, and the closer “Slime” feels like the theme song to a cheesy sci-fi flick we never got to see. Minot put the raw in rawk ‘n roll. Book a room at the Thunderbird Motel today and do the hip shake, baby.
HOME RUNS
PRESSURE SET – Pressure Set (Dr. Strange Records)
These Chicago punk lifers have made so much music in so many bands that you have to wonder what they sought to accomplish in Pressure Set. Maybe they just had some things they wanted to get off their collective chests, but man, can these guys play. The voice belongs to Daryl Wilson of the Bollweevils, who sings in a quirky register and tonality, a far cry from the usual hardcore bluster and raw-throated shouting. Dom Brining’s guitar brings the muscle (with distortion and chords, few solos), while Simon Lamb’s bass and Rob Burleson’s drums lock in for a powerful chugging bottom. While Wilson sings everything like his life depends on it, there’s melody aplenty, soaring gang harmonies, and lyrics that address political unrest, dysfunctional personalities, broken relationships, health scares, and the existential dread of living in 2026. Inspirational verse: “Time’s so fleeting because life won’t wait, we can’t stop the bleeding, we’ll exsanguinate / No one’s listening, no one’s trying, why create when everyone is dying?” To be or not to be, dude. That is the question.
QUIZ SHOW – “XONO” EP (Magic Door Record Label)
Quiz Show may be based in Montclair, NJ, but began as a “second act” band by members of D.C. art/punk icons Shudder To Think, returning to music after a lengthy hiatus. Only frontman Chris Mathews remains from that original lineup; the 3-track “XONO” EP features bassist Jesse Krakow and drummer Joe Billy III, and was produced by renowned Jersey dialtwister Ray Ketchem (GBV, Luna, Elk City, Dambuilders,) who does yeoman’s work capturing and channeling the band’s insane dynamics and energy. On the title track, Quiz Show maintains the off-kilter post-post-punk approach of Shudder To Think – theatrical, melodic, angular and surprisingly poppy. While Chris Mathews’ voice isn’t as weird as Craig Wedren’s shrieky falsetto, his vocals qualify as slightly deranged and in-your-face. Think Blue Oyster Cult meets Jane’s Addiction on Adderall. “Haircut Sphinx” mixes more loud post-punk clatter and thunk with a vocal that veers into Queen territory, as Mathews warbles about a “haircut sphinx” like an aria from a Klingon opera, and ”Pom Pom Boy” changes things up by stripping the track down to just an acoustic guitar and delicate harmonies juxtaposed with caterwauling call-and-response vocals between Mathews and drummer Joe Billy III. “Why you making so much noise?” asks Mathews derisively. “You’re just a pom pom boy.”
THE VAN PELT – Remain Obscure (Ernest Jenning Record Co.)
Nearly 30 years after they (supposedly) broke up, the Van Pelt return with their second second-life album in three years, following 2023’s impressive Artists & Merchants (there are some odds ‘n’ sods rarities, demos, and a live album available too). This is a band that’s never figured out how to quit. Remain Obscure follows the general pattern of the Van Pelt’s other releases, with singer/guitarist Chris Leo mostly speak/singing his poetic lyrics over the music. Bryan Maryansky’s guitar morphs into myriad tones and textures, Sean Greene’s bass flutters hypnotically (check out “A Voralberg of the Mind”) and Neil O’Brien’s drums often rise to the top of the mix. Leo actually sings a bit this time around, and when he recites his lyrics, he delivers them in a literary, conversational style, not the angry staccato Sprechgesang of Idles, Dry Cleaning, or Fontaines D.C. “Chris Is Riding Horses in Ojai” justaposes ominous guitar tones and an urgent pace with bubblegum lyrics that detail the members’ pursuits during their hiatus like The Monkees’ theme. That dichotomy – silly vs. serious, ominous vs. comical – runs throughout the album, along with something new, a strange beauty that emerges in between the harrowing guitar parts and Leo’s rants. Inspirational verse: “Instead of lending me an arm, you said, ‘man, there’s something really wrong with you’ / and I said, ‘Of course there is!’”
WIRE CRIMES – Distortions (self-released)
Wire Crimes – the current one-man studio project of New Jersey musician, Adam Copeland – impresses with tracks that roil, churn, expand and contract, densely produced with multiple layers of synthesizers, guitars, percussion and Copeland’s keening vocal. He doesn’t have a “big” voice in the showbiz sense and there are no vocal pyrotechnics; he just possesses an innate ability to make everything he sings sound like the truth. After an instrumental intro, “Surround” sounds a clarion call against substance abuse, from dime bags to beers, an almost frantic chorus insisting, repeatedly, “It’s a drug, it’s a drug, it’s a drug.” A love song, “Ocean And Night,” follows, with percolating percussion and swirling synths creating a romantic tapestry. Synths and bass combine in an undulating bass line, and Copeland sings in his lowest register, at least to start. By the last verse, he’s singing at the top of his range, providing lift and promise. On “Daydreaming,” the lightness and upbeat tone of the music – a hip-shaking indie-rock track with a catchy ba-ba-ba chorus – stands in contrast to the lyrics, a jeremiad bemoaning environmental Armageddon. The closer, “Beat By Beat,” features overdubbed vocals sounding like a chorale, with tinkling piano, a downcast melody, and a heartbeat-like drum beat, but Copeland ends the album with hope. “Beat by beat, every intonation, all of our hearts back in rhythm again / Beat by beat, there’s always time.” Let’s hope so. In the meantime, as we wait for the rivers to rise and the air to poison us, at least – as on the Titanic – the music will be good.
SURGEON GENERAL – Don’t Mind The Body (self-released)
”I dodged the bullet of an ordinary life,” Garrett Crusan sings on the title track of Surgeon General’s debut album, announcing the arrival of a NYC band that joins a continuum stretching from the Velvet Underground through The Strokes and into the present. “Hesitation” follows and it finds that same groove, with a rhythm section that pulses to the heartbeat of the city, and a vocalist who segues from hip nonchalance to screaming intensity. Jaren Gallo’s bass and Harry Zucker’s drums lock in on a groove like a rabid dog biting a mailman’s leg; Laila Smith’s guitar creates jangly textures, Crusan talk/sings and shouts, and somewhere, Lou Reed smiles approvingly. With only eight songs that clock in at a sparse half hour, Don’t Mind The Body ends way too soon, evidence that the old show biz dictum about “always leave ‘em wanting more” still holds. But hey, when those eight songs deliver this much drama, dynamics, and excitement, as well as that ineffable, indescribable, rock ‘n’ roll sense of cool, it’s more than enough.
IMMERSION – What Is Lost Will Return (swim~)
Put a gun to my head and ask me to choose between the first three Ramones albums and the first three Wire records, and you’re going to have to clean up a fairly ugly mess. The good news is that Immersion – Wire’s Colin Newman and Minimal Compact’s Malka Spigel – doesn’t force that choice. Their latest electronic excursion finds the sweet spot between Wire’s clipped experimentalism and the kind of melodic payoff that might make a mainstream pop songwriter briefly reconsider their life choices.
Not that Newman and Spigel care what we think; they even sing about it on “We Don’t Need Your Validation.” They’re just going about their business, mixing Spigel’s enticing, melodic vocals with Newman’s pithy spoken exhortations and his own singing, delivered with the veddy British reserve of a Robyn Hitchcock. At eight tracks, the album doesn’t out stay its welcome. “Frequencies & Echoes” closes things out with an instrumental that seems to lift off from the speakers and head toward some distant corner of the cosmos. By then, Immersion has accomplished exactly what its name promises. Three decades into their collaboration, Newman and Spigel have made their most compelling Immersion record yet – music you can lose yourself in, immersed in sounds and rhythms that bring the comfort of the familiar and yet carry the stamp of the different.