No Pain In Pop

Paradise Vendors

Chaps, grasp glands for London’s Male Bonding, three sorts getting fresh with that swamp-bass-super-sound and the teenage poltergeist scar-isms of a pink punk past. Descended from (early) Descendents, gay for Gray Matter, ‘Rehearsal Song’’s tuneful racket seems made B(y).S(aturdays).F(or).S(aturdays)., rising sober, miraculously enough, to turn up at your friend’s house with an amp and some plugs just as mother and father are heading out to John Lewis for salad and furnishings. Male Bonding are no flannel arrivistes, there back in the Smell-sent days, as the first lo-fi rumbles moving across the water were picked up by alien wave stations hunkered down somewhere in the undergrowth plunge of Epping Forest.

Male Bonding’s Paradise Vendors Inc label yesterday issued another slab of Eden in the form of a four-way split that grapples to gather a quartet NPIP favourites: Old Blood, Graffiti Island, Rapid Youth (the Murietta collective) and, of course, MB themselves. Get it here.



MP3: Male Bonding - Rehearsal Song

Tags: graffiti island, male bonding, old blood, paradise vendors inc, rapid youth

And finally, The Murrieta Three!

A couple of months lag on this one, but Murrieta’s dirty pop triumvirate are completed by Tyler Haran, whose Twin Lion project flinches amid a similar shit-salt of guitar needle and amp haze. Along with Brent ‘Trudgers‘ Mitzner and Travis Von Sydow (Ancient Crux) Haran makes Rapid Youth his daily concern and tracks like ‘POWRRR’ and ‘Broken Feets (Version)’ draw-off to wriggle and splash in the bad blood of RY; while ‘Vacation Pt. 2′ is built slighter but wiry, its life in its hands as it saunters in to sucker punch some local muscle. AWESOME POWER is the name of the album, out now through Family Time Records, while splits with the aforementioned Trudgers and Old Blood are also in the offing.



MP3: Twin Lion - POWRRR



MP3: Twin Lion - Broken Feets (Version)



MP3: Twin Lion - Vacation Pt. 2

Tags: ancient crux, murrieta, rapid youth, trudgers, twin lion, tyler haran

Sore Boys

After the tender swoon of Ancient Crux comes the second Murrieta bust-out. Brent Mitzner’s Trudgers (”gothic/gothic/gothic”) swing more bitten and aggrieved than his hometown compadres, guitars bright as home-polished shrapnel glinting in the gloom of a plagued mind, dropping like small fortunes lost through the entirety of ‘Brother Boogie’’s mantric plea. ‘Catholic Candles’ is darker still; sick, lunatic and glum, and though Mitzner’s work makes no explicit reference to California, it seems to exist in Lynchian limbo between light and dark, macabre and mundane.



MP3: Trudgers - Brother Boogie



MP3: Trudgers - Catholic Candles

Tags: brent mitzner, hi shadow, rapid youth, trudgers, twin lion

Corner Boys

Photography by Stephane Guisard

In 1980, 2,200 people lived in the town of Murrieta, California. By 1991 it was a city that held 24,000 bodies and last year’s estimates put the population at approximately 100,173. While fresh faces swell all about them, “dreamy pop punx” trio Rapid Youth seem happier to play amongst themselves; Tyler Haran attracting ears as Twin Lion, Brent Mitzner as Trudgers and Travis von Sydow with his Ancient Crux. All three solo projects wound up with Family Time Records, all three are awesome and all three will be featured here at some point this week.

von Sydow leads the boomtown charge, ‘Teen Dreams’ sauntering along trapped in one of those moments that are so acutely alive with possibility and resonance they get beneath the thick skin of cliches about eyes being oceans and seeing girls in your sleep, doo-wop swallowing this bitter punk whole before spitting him at the moon. ‘Coupling’ is more downbeaten, matter-of-fact vocals following synths that blur von Sydow’s lo-fi junket like continual streetlights peered at from behind crudely de-misted windows.

Both these tracks feature on the exquisitely named Interracial Coupling, recorded by Haran in his bedroom and available through Family Time now.



MP3: Ancient Crux - In Teen Dreams



MP3: Ancient Crux - Coupling

Tags: ancient crux, family time records, rapid youth, travis von sydow, trudgers, twin lion