Marked Men “Ghosts”

Published On: December 16, 2021Tags: , , , ,

Marked Men “Ghosts” 2009. Dirtnap Records. Tight and fast poppy garage punk out of Texas. Ghosts is Marked Men’s fourth and (so far) final LP, not counting On the Other Side the singles, rarities and b-sides comp they released in 2018, all recorded 10 years or more previously. The band recorded and mixed the LP in a shed and while the recording is really good, it definitely has a lo-fi, tin can, jangly quality. The songs are super-snotty, simple and fly by so quickly it’s hard to nail down my top tracks. “Head Set” is really great, crawls into your head to set in the memory for a beat or three (probably not the meaning behind the title but it is catchy as hell) as is another head song, “All In Your Head,” the album’s opener. The title track “Ghosts” is super-melodic (still really snotty and punchy) with a bunch of whoa-whoa’s, kind of like a mashup of Buzzcocks and 7 Seconds. I ordered this LP pretty recently from Green Noise Records (the distributor for Dirtnap Records – they were having a Dirtnap special) after Dirtnap Ken gave me a copy of Marked Men’s Fix My Brain – I missed the mark on the Mark Men when they were an active band in the early-to-mid 2000’s.