Infra Combo Exsanguinated by Punk cassette
Experimental guitar album that approaches punk through textural noise and rhythmic loops, like TELEVISION by way of the DEAD C. “Exsanguinated by Punk” appears as three movements with JOHN COLTRANE-style parenthetical descriptions: “Acknowledgement,” “Empathy,” and “Ascension,” painting a theme with seemingly improvised passages that meld the vocabulary of punk and jazz. The beautiful opener “Eulogy for Jean-Luc Godard” combines droning chords with exploratory noodling over stumbling drums. And while we’re on the subject of Godard, he was punk as fuck. Keep your Repo Man and give me his film Weekend, where consumer culture literally crashes and burns, as the ultimate punk movie any day. Similarly, INFRA COMBO stomps through genre conventions and treads on our sacred traditions with the second and third iterations of the title track. “Empathy” contains the lines, “When all the spikes have gone limp / And the chains have lost their chrome / When my leather jacket has gone back to the earth / We pack up and go home,” while “Ascension” builds into a detuned march that Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo would happily put their names on, with the lyrics “If this is all there is / Then my heart breaks / If this is all there is / Then the style isn’t worth the space.” It’s a challenging album that rejects the staid conformity that comes with this territory we inhabit while embracing the radical experimentation that brought us here in the first place.