Astro Brat – Bone Dry
Failure is a wonderful thing. I mean, it can certainly inspire a great song, a wonderful memoir, or tickle pink someone born with a natural kink for pain, self-humiliation and other masochistic activities.
In other words, just like success, failure’s worth very little if you don’t actually have a reason to use it. No, if you don’t have a plan, it’s best to stick to mediocrity, to existing, to getting by. You’ll be surprised how well that suits most people.
On the other hand, a bit of horrendous personal failure might be just the ingredient you need to acquire a plan in the first place. One wonders whether the tales of misguided misdeeds came first for Astro Brat or the business about being in a band.
Either way, “Bone Dry” is a strong single that mixes pop-punk energy with garage-rock bass riffs and 60s-like vocal melodies. It’s a song that feels like it ought to be playing in your head while you’re busy renting out that motel room in the middle of the night and making plans to spend the weekend with the phone turned off. It won’t dissuade you from actually doing it, most probably. But it might make you try to remember if you had a plan going into all of this in the first place.
Def Nettle – Mohawk
You were supposed to hate punk-rock, at least if the people on stage, who didn’t even think of themselves as musicians half the time, had their way. And, the punk fashion was designed as a horrendous thing, an ode to pure nihilism.
Sadly, things didn’t exactly work out that way. You get idiots like me writing blogs about Steve Jones’ guitar tone. And, what’s worse, you get all sorts of dull, rich kids from the worlds of finance, professional sports and tech proclaiming that they are “punk rock.”
That’s swell, I suppose. Some of the best songs about blues songs about selling your soul to the devil will end up as a commercial soundtrack. There’s no reason to fight it out amongst ourselves to determine who is more punk. But maybe it’s good to realise that most modern punk is playing dress up, as talented Irish group Def Nettle is happy to tell us.
There’s certainly a revival of post-punk, and it’s happening especially in Britain and Ireland. But while the typical singer tied to this genre will shout lyrics about how London is wet and miserable, the vocals across Def Nettle’s song sound like the work of someone reading existential philosophy in a care and penning lyrics while staring at the world with a wry smile. And, yes, a Mohawk costs just a few bills now anyway.
