Ribbon Ribbon demo cassette
The aesthetics of punk music packaging have evolved to a baffling place where a band called RIBBON can put crude, cherubic figures and a crumbly castle on the cover of their tape that’s filled with spindly splashes of rugged hardcore, and somehow it works. This Indonesian band’s bare-bones approach is bolstered by a cool vocal performance, and the style is hardcore punk in its original configuration—’70s attitude with the ferocity knob turned up to eleven. Their sound is striking enough that if I were to walk into a record shop where it was playing, I’d ask “who is this?”. Remember JJ DOLL? They kind of sound like the short-lived, post-IVY NYC act JJ DOLL, minus Shiva’s hypnotic guitars and with more of a straightforward Oi!-type influence.