Pat and the Pissers Soil cassette
You might be surprised to learn that Indianapolis has a pretty thriving punk scene. It certainly caught me off guard, and I’ve been living here since 2019. Had you asked me back then, I would have told you that Bloomington (not quite an hour away) was the more happening punk town. I’m pretty sure I would have been right, too. But there were a handful of bands in Indy starting up around that time, including PAT AND THE PISSERS, and slowly but surely a scene seems to have sprung up around them. All of a sudden, tons of new local bands are filling up bills, packing out venues, and actually enticing cool out-of-town acts to swing through. The scene skews hardcore, and PAT AND THE PISSERS are predominantly a hardcore band. But if you give this release a listen (and you should!), you’ll find that it’s not all that straightforward. The twelve songs on this cassette are a hodgepodge of hardcore sounds—I’m hearing snatches of early SoCal hardcore, I Against I BAD BRAINS, and, like, late ’80s Revalation Records—and brattier punk. On the hardcore end of things, you get songs like “Out of Style,” which sounds like a mash-up of CIRCLE JERKS and JUDGE, or “Konner,” which could have been pulled off LAFFING GAS’s last LP. While on the punker side, you get tracks like “Outsourcing”, which is more of a straightforward start/stop sneering punk affair (with sporadic hair metal leads!), or “Working Wage,” which sounds like a less sing-songy SAINTS, with its bratty talk-sung vocals. I think things could be tightened up a bit here and there, and these disparate sounds could be woven together a little more seamlessly, but overall I think these are pretty cool tunes. Excited to see what they do next!