Disco Doom - Mt. Surreal (2022)

Disco Doom is a Zurich-based band who have been active since 2002 when they released their first EP on their own record label, Defer Records. 20 years later, the band released Mt. Surreal - their 5th full length album - also released through their own Swiss record label but released in the US through Exploding In Sound Records out of Jersey City. 

I found out about this band as I've been recently obsessed the band Helvetia. Upon purchasing a Helvetia record on bandcamp, I see Disco Doom being personally recommended by Jason Albertini from Helvetia - who I would learn also played drums on Disco Doom's third full length, Trux Reverb, which was released in the US through The Static Cult Label, a label co-started by Duster's Clay Parton Albertini also played in Duster). 

So I give this album a listen and it's fucking great, as are the other releases by Disco Doom, who seem to only have gotten better with time. Weirdly enough, people don't really talk about this band. I can't find their album stocked in, supposedly wonderful, NJ record stores either despite being peddled by a local label. 

 

The band has an experimental indie rock vibe that's simultaneously minimal and psychedelic. They have moments where they are Built to Spill-esque if all the lushness was stripped away in favor of sparsity. They have toured with Built to Spill so this comparison might be too easy... I'm actually having a hard time finding a comparison. The music's very approachable but also slightly off-kilter and tense. Like Helvetia, they have a solid and steady rhythm section providing the canvas, but everything else ... the guitars, vocals and sonic ornamentation... is dripped and splattered across like paint from a saturated brush. It's not as chaotic as a Jackson Pollock, Disco Doom is more Pat Steir or Cy Twombly. 

Criminally underrated. 

8 songs.

Disco Doom - Mt. Surreal

Twisted Teens - Twisted Teens (2024)

I think the greatest thing an artist can do is embrace whatever has come before while pushing the dialogue forward. By adding an experimental element - an unconventional medium, technique, perspective, or tool - one can create something that stands out... something special.

Here we have something special. Within the first minute of the first track, you will understand why. Twisted Teens offer something immediately familiar, a kind of lo-fi, late-70s punk not entirely dissimilar to what you'll hear coming out of Australia these days. First, you'll note the vocalist, credited as Cas P. ian, sings with an appealing tuneful grit: a campfire ballad with a leather throat.... like Tom Waits meets David Bazan. But you'll also notice that the musty basement crunch of the opening track is balanced by something luminous - the glassy sheen of the pedal steel guitar provided by RJ Santos. And so, it is only fitting that it is Cas P. ian and RJ Santos on the cover of this, the band's first release. 

These 11 tracks are more than the sum of their parts, however. This is more than just "punk rock with a pedal steel" gimmick. There is clear history behind this songwriting and delivery, one that hints heavily at years of experience. Since 2004, singer Cas P. ian fronted Blackbird Raum, a well-known anarcho-folk punk band from California. The drummer from that group, Magnus Nymo, is also credited on the Twisted Teens record. Originally from Norway, Magnus also played in drums in a Norwegian black metal band called Forcefed Horsehead. RJ Santos, who is clearly an adept pedal steel player, has more of an online presence devoted to being a talented painter.

While the music on Twisted Teens varies from punk to country to classic rock, folk, and 90s indie rock, I don't pick up on that anarcho-folk punk element here (and certainly no black metal). In that way, Twisted Teens isn’t a reinvention of any genre... but it’s a reminder that familiar ingredients can still taste surprising in the right hands.

Twisted Teens - Twisted Teens

The Gobs - Eight Things at Once (2023)

 

Olympia’s The Gobs makes music like a raccoon trapped in a vending machine—frantic, confused, and somehow kind of inspiring. Their 2023 album, Eight Things at Once, is 24 tracks of synth-stabbed, tape-scorched punk that sounds like it was recorded in a porta-potty during an exorcism. Every song is under two minutes because any longer would be medically unsafe. “Adderall or Nothing” is what happens when your frontal lobe dissolves in a gas station bathroom, while “Get a Dog (That Can Kill Me If It Wants To)” is a love song, probably. “I Wanna Fuck the Moon” is either a metaphor or a cry for help—either way, it slaps. The keyboards aren’t playing along so much as heckling the guitar, like a drunk uncle at a little league game.

Listening to this album feels like licking a car battery during a lightning storm and glimpsing something vast and unspeakably cool. When you snap out of it, you’re barefoot in a Denny’s parking lot, your pockets are full of teeth (not yours), and you know, with a deep certainty, that something incredible just happened—something wild, beautiful, and slightly cursed, now pulsing just out of reach in the back of your brain.

The Gobs - Eight Things at Once