Skid City Greetings From Skid City LP
SKID CITY’s debut LP brings us some wonderfully ugly pub grooves from Melbourne. This band plays a straightforward type of ’70s-style punk rock that’s slathered in attitude and perfectly fucked in all kinds of ways. There’s layers that remind me of motor-garage punkers of the late ’90s like B-MOVIE RATS and the SNAKE CHARMERS, there are parts that echo the grizzled graveyard blues of the excellent first GOLDEN PELICANS LP, and by the time we get to “Dumb,” they’ve gone full DEAD BOYS on us. The straight pub rock comes out on the album’s briefest track, “Alright With Me,” but it fits. Everything is laced with stand-out insidious guitars and raspy disaffected growls, and delivered with a jaded angst probably best expressed in recent decades by the amazing CARBONAS and the adjacent EX-HUMANS. Hitting a perfect ratio of grime and swagger, this is one of the brightest highlights of the year thus far, and the singer’s ragged jeers sound like he couldn’t care less.