Soft garage rock, clean guitars, and sufficient drums. Reissued from 2018, plus a newly-mixed track. Catchy and fun sounds on this 12”, but evidently more on the garage side than with any punk rock features. Fresher than most garage projects, and even has some slight MINUTEMEN references in the instrumental, but the second the voices start to sing, you can tell the tidiness of all this. It’s a bit boring and excessively existentialist, yet very well-executed.
I loved PINCH POINTS’ debut LP. It was punchy and pointed, the kind of jagged-angle punk with a POV that you leave on repeat. I didn’t think they could take such a grand leap forward, but sure as shit, they did. This collection of songs is a hell of a lot of fun musically, but the lyrics brought me to my knees. It’s all on-the-nose, but not in the way people usually mean as a lazy critique. The band says what it means, because they’re not being cute or coy. With songs about mental health, misogyny, the incarceration and murder of First Nations peoples at the hands of police, and literal calls to action against apathy, these are important screeds against the ills of our globally unwell society. Then the band wraps it all in a package of catchy, well-read hooks and illuminated playing across the board. A recent video gave a peek into the band’s writing process, and I saw something I hadn’t seen in a jam space in a long time: a white board featuring every bridge and sub-bridge and ABCs galore. It makes sense, the results are a sort of prog-but-not-for-dorks lightning bolt of punk with an effortless (sounding) execution. It’s exhilarating, and already leaves me breathless for the next release.
