Beast - Pussycat And The Dirty Johnsons (Hound Gawd) 

There’s more fuzz on this than a box of rotting fruit in a share house kitchen. Two guitars, drums, no bass, simple punk rock songs and Puss Johnson’s tuneful, yet in-your-face, vocal is a monstrously good combination.

“Beast” is 12 songs by a UK band with a venomous sound on a German label. Who says Brexit is a thing? 

The back story is that guitarist Dirty Jake formed the band in 2002 but it took eight years to find Puss Johnson’s vocal and a more or less settled line-up. Two years later, their bass player was given the flick and The Dirty Johnsons continued as a trio. So they pre-date Amyl and The Sniffers - who are an obvious comparator - by a fair stretch. 

Watch Out! Look Out! - Doojiman & The Exploders (Heavy Medication)

Dunno about you but Scandirock was thicker on the ground in these parts in the 1990s than dandruff at a record collector fair. Doojiman & The Exploders are from Sweden and use a simple recipe of punk guitars from the garage, a sackful of strong songs and buckets of phlegm to attitude to rock the house down.

You gotta to be good to steal the title of a Stooges outtake as the name of your band and Doojiman & The Exploders are. There are traces of The (early) Hives, a less metal-ly Gluecefier and the venerable ‘Copters, sans six-string histrionics, on this 45rpm, nine-track slice of vinyl.

Mind Hive - Wire (Pinkflag)
10.20 - Wire (Pinkflag)

First to the Rolling Rock ratings: "Mind Hive" gets a mighty seven bottles, and "10.20", six out of a possible five each... That's because I'm being stingy. Both these new Wire albums are series of pieces you simply play over and over. Then return to.

The only comparison I'll make today is that "Mind Hive" reminds me of Hugo Race's recent "Starbirth" - both seem compelled to take a long, personal view of where we are and, with mesmeric power and grace, both give us a view refracted from the apparently oblivious mainstream. We're in a state of flux, with numbed and shaved antennae.

Love is Dead - Snatches of Pink (8th House Records) 

This dude, Michael Rank, from Chapel Hill should be a big star by now, but you know how the sickeningly sucks shit, corporate muzak-biz only promotes sold soul, formulaic garbage pop, nowadays. His outstandingly funky solo CDs and various wild and sensual rocknroll bands (Snatches Of Pink, Clarissa and Stag) have made summa the most under-rated and soulful rocknroll of our generation.

He's a farmer, a father, a badass guitar player, a ballet dancer, and one of my favorite rocknroll vocalists, with a voice that is sometimes reminiscent of Jakob Dylan's whispery folkish croon, or naked and vulnerable as Curtis Mayfield or D'Angelo, or as dirty-beautiful, get-down raunchy, first take, Marlboro belligerent and untamed as Bryan Small or Alice Cooper. He's one of Murkkka's only remaining rockers who can sit at the same end of the bar as most of our Australian brethren.

Starbirth/Stardeath - Hugo Race and the True Spirit (Gusstaff Records)

Hugo Race: Troubadour, manic perpetuum mobile and musical engine, was fortunate enough to be in his home town of Melbourne while the global pandemic unfolded, trapping him in a world he never made. Gigs were cancelled around the world, his plans spun away...and he turned inward.

Then, outward. Even after the first few songs, it seems clear that Hugo is looking for some sort of reinvention, a crossing of a Rubicon. "Starbirth/ Stardeath" definitely marks a new phase.

Alright, for the uninitiated, I could cite Race's lengthy rep: noted spark in Melbourne's late 1970s and early '80s underground; former Bad Seed (on what is arguably Nick Cave's most sonically extreme album); leader of The Wreckery, and his own True Spirit; writer of books, soundtracks, and songs for other people and songs for us...but that tells you little.

Eleven Women - Steve Kilbey (Foghorn)

COVID’s pervasive impact forced Steve Kilbey to suspend the piecemeal process of assembling another Church album and instead make a solo record. It was done on the fly and from the ground up. 

Equipped with a loose but strong batch of songs, a modest budget delivered by PayPal from intimate online shows and willing collaborators in guitarist-bassist Gareth Koch, Roger Mason from the very borning Icehouse on keys and Barton Price (of the Models, Sardine v, Flaming Hands et al) on drums, Kilbey and His Winged Heels delivered “Eleven Women” in just three days.