Guiding Light Guiding Light cassette
First recorded outing from this new group of Austin punk provocateurs, with five tracks whipping by in a flurry of jangly hyper-strummed guitar (bordering on early WEDDING PRESENT velocity), incessantly bobbing bass, breakneck drumming, and mile-a-minute bilingual German/English femme vocals—it’s the dream world collision of BIG FLAME and HANS-A-PLAST that I never knew that I needed! I’m especially partial to ”Lost in Voices,” which careens for a minute-and-a-half like KLEENEX if they’d existed in the age of Lumpy Records, so restless and wired that it’s almost easy to overlook how intricate and complex the songwriting truly is, as well as the dusty lo-fi tumble of “Spiegelbild,” where GUIDING LIGHT ties knots in the loose threads left hanging by the two-headed dog of 2010s Lone Star art-damage excellence (VIVIENNE STYG/BLUE DOLPHIN) with the addition of some highly Neue Deutsche Welle-inspired off-kilter melodies and warbling synth. Get on it, mess(thetics) with Texas.