V/A Tape Dad cassette
Tape Dad is a cassette label from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and this is their first compilation release, with plans of doing a new one to be released every year on Father’s Day. Very clever, Cassette Daddy! “It’s a crazy hodgepodge of different genres, styles, cities of origin, and friends” (per the label’s Bandcamp discussing the compilation), and I couldn’t agree more. With twenty tracks, I could go on about this forever, but rather than that I am going to focus on the handful of standout tracks from the punk/punk-adjacent realm that readers of MRR may care about, ignoring the jammy/college rock/singer-songwriter/indie/art stuff and leaving that for another place to review. PONO A.M. kicks off the comp with a killer driving track of garage-infused insanity not unlike THEE OH SEES. MUSCLEGOOSE has a weird, spastic, cow-punk kind of feel to them. BIG GRUMP, whose cassette I also just reviewed, is some cool, nasty noise rock. The PHLEGMS play a cool mixture of driving garage rock and post-punk. There’s a lot of cool stuff on this comp, and a lot that is very much not for me. Give it a listen and decide for yourself!