Detroit-based garagey pop-punk. “Like a bag of Sour Patch Kids filled with razor blades, TART gives you the sugary dopamine hit you crave and the bloody aftertaste you weren’t expecting. Zee Bricker’s lashing vocal delivery cuts through Adam and Donny’s pummeling rhythm section like a sharpened switchblade to the jugular. It hurts so good.” – SlyVinyl via Romanus Records. Self-described by singer Bricker as “Sinister shred-pop ‘femmelectro’ new wave.” (from Muzique Magazine who has this to say: “Bricker’s wickedly snarling voice infuses the lyrics with Cruella de Vil timbres”). Tart’s debut LP is raw, femme-forward, raucous, a bit snotty and fun! My top tracks include “Running Yr Mouth,” which is a pissed-off rocker. “Toothache” has a killer beat with slyly hilarious lyrics and the buzzy, grinding guitar on “Around With You” is great. I’m not sure why it’s taken me three + years to get around to this one (I ordered it in October 2020 and probably received it in early ’21 so I suppose I can blame the pandemic for yet another thing). Tart hasn’t been active from what I can tell – their last Instagram past was from 2022 so I think they just kinda fell off my radar. There’s a couple of videos on YouTube but other than that, Tart doesn’t have much of an online presence. The entire album is available to “watch” (listen) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x9OiXQCGks

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Daisy Caplan of Lung, Shank Hall

Kate Wakefield of Lung, Shank Hall

Until now, I was not familiar with SKRT, an art-punk trio from Ohio. Their sound is loud, messy and unique noise rock. Singer Ashley Pooler (also on guitar) is ferocious, wailing over weirdly jagged rhythms courtesy of Abbie Romero on drums and Micah Kemplin on bass.  My favorite of their four tracks on the split is the excellently titled “Snowsuit for the Apocalypse.” “Black Adderall” is also really cool, really weird – lots of tempo and energy shifts, from a funky groove to a swinging melody to some dissonant piano and spoken whispery words but that only seems to be on the vinyl version, not the YouTube digital recording linked here. Like Lung’s selections, these tracks are only available on this EP (they only have one other release, a 7-song album from 2016, Toxic Schlock).

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Volk “Cashville” 2021. Romanus Records, limited edition, literally cash-filled Cashville. Last night we saw Volk perform at Shank Hall here in Milwaukee (they’re on tour with the Finnish band Steve ‘n’ Seagulls who were fucking brilliant!); it’s been just over a year since the last show of theirs we attended so it was excellent to rock out to some cow punk!

Volk (Eleot Reich on drums/vocals, Chris Lowe on guitar/vocals) performed some of my favorite songs from Cashville including the title track “Welcome to Cashville,” the sultry and somewhat sinister “I Fed Animals,” “Snake Farm” (originally by Ray Wylie Hubbard) which they’ve revamped slightly since last year and I’m totally digging the changes, and one of the best ass-shaking alt-country rockers ever, “Honey Bee.” It’s foot-stomping and head-banging. Volk is on a pretty heavy tour at the moment and they’re just out of the studio from recording their forthcoming LP. They teased at least one of the new songs at Shank: it was wildly funky and I’m really excited to hear the rest of the album. Like last year, they crashed at our house after the show and, being the hard-working duo that they are, were up early to keep putting the final touches on that record before they head up to Appleton for their next show tonight.

Chris and Eleot on dualing laptops, working their new LP magic

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Maness Brothers “God Bless the Maness Brothers” 2020. Romanus Records. Very limited edition (50 copies) glow-in-the-dark sand-filled vinyl. Heavy, heavy heavy blues from Missouri. God Bless is the two-piece siblings’ second LP (their first, self-titled, from 2017 is also on Romanus as is their 2012 EP Grief Factory; Maness Brothers were one of the first bands to release on the Romanus label). Jake and David are both pretty young (late 20’s/early 30’s) but they channel the spirit of old soul classic and gritty blues. That classic sound is infused with Jake’s boundless energy on his relentlessly crashing drums and David’s hard-driving guitar; they trade off on vocals. They also put on a hell of a show; we’ve seen them perform a few times, most recently in August of 2019 at Romanus Fest in Indianapolis (I’m actually not sure they’ve played out much since then beyond a handful of local Missouri shows, though I feel like maybe we caught a livestream in 2020 when that was still a “fun” pandemic thing to do). Here’s a couple of photos from that Romanus Fest set (if you squint you can see juke-joint rockers CATL in the background in the second picture).

Most of God Bless is fast, blues rock’n’roll and those are definitely my top tracks: “Pain,” “Tupelo,” “Drive Me” and the high energy gospel meets wild slide guitar “Lord Thank You Very Much” but they can also slow it down big-time and go spiritual like on “Dip My Sins (In the River).”

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Joshua Powell “Skeleton Party” 2021. Romanus Records. Limited edition (50 copies) tri-color variant. Dream pop with an edge out of Indianapolis. Whispers of psychedelia that one writer described as a “fever dream with experimental sounds weaving a story” (there’s theremin!) and lyrics that are intentionally poetic: Joshua Powell says “Songwriting is not very emotional for me. It isn’t a cathartic process. I look at it as academic or intellectual work. I want it to be beautiful and sound but I want it to be something I’m proud of as well.” (From an interview on Pattern) Despite having been written and recorded during the pandemic (Powell: “The world was a big hell mouth at the time of recording”), the darkness of Skeleton Party is far from depressing, more folky goth-inspired lush and dense with some swirly rainbow brightness glistening at the edges; the liner notes state that “this record has been certified as a magical artifact by all pertinent boards and covens of mages, clerics, witches and shamans.” My favorite tracks are the opener “Sad Boy at the Skeleton Party” (such a great title!), the danceable – and at times hard-rocking – “Coral Castle” and another guitar-forward, Pink Floyd-ish complex prog-rocker “Nine of Swords.” My only real criticism of Skeleton Party is the occasional use of autotune (i.e. at the end of the otherwise stellar song “Rainbow Trout“) of which I am never ever a fan.  We’ve seen Joshua Powell play live at least once – at Romanus Fest in Indy, 2018 or 2019, I can’t remember! – and I think another time, at Mile of Music maybe? We were hoping to catch them play again this year but sadly missed out when they came through our town. Powell and his crew did stay at my friend’s home after their Appleton performance this fall and she reported that they are the sweetest group of guys ever, great houseguests 😊

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S.M. Wolf headlined Romanus Fest last month – the fest doubled as their record release party – and I’m super-bummed we missed it; we’ve made it down to Indianapolis for all the past Romanus Fests and I’m hoping we can get there in 2022 – maybe S.M. Wolf will perform at it again – their music is pretty much perfect for a late summer outdoor evening festival.

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Injecting Strangers “Patience, Child” 2014/2021, Romanus Records (Crypt Collection), very limited edition (50 copies), splatter colored vinyl. Patience, Child, the debut album from Cincinnati’s indie pop band Injecting Strangers, came out in 2014 as a digital-only release. It’s danceable, super-fun indie pop, weird and hilarious. I had never heard of the band but with my goal to have at least one variant of every Romanus record, I jumped at the chance to have a copy, the label’s first from their new Crypt Collection. My favorite tracks are the campy, psycho-surf “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (In Space),” “Lucky” (with the catchy chorus “I’m a lucky little fucker”), the creepy yet bouncy “Haunted Heavens” (which will fit nicely on a Halloween playlist; Cincinnati’s City Beat reviewer has this to say about the track: “It’s like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” filtered through Queen, Public Image Limited and The Nightmare Before Christmas and then re-filtered through a modern Indie Rock mindset”) and the 70′s-ish glam hard rocker “Shooter Upper.”

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Volk “Cashville” 2021. Romanus Records. Very limited pre-release* edition, liquid filled colored vinyl, cover hand-drawn by drummer/singer Eleot Reich, signed by Reich and guitarist/singer Chris Lowe. Cow punk from Nashville, Volk’s debut LP is so freaking amazing! It’s big, thundering power out of the hard-working two-piece with a sound like the White Stripes spent a month jamming with Dolly and Waylon in a down-south garage. I love the whole album, but my top songs are “Welcome to Cashville” (with a lead-in from Romanus’ Chris Banta on the audio and video), the wicked-high energy “Honey Bee” (with another Banta cameo), “I Fed Animals” which is dark and menacing (a sound I’m particularly fond of), and their cover of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Snake Farm” which is hilarious.

Volk performed all of those songs (and more!) at the show we saw this past week up in Green Bay at the Lyric Room. Volk puts on a killer show, super high-energy. They’re on tour with Electric Six and though the Six is a dance rock band, the combo totally worked and I danced pretty much non-stop for over 2 hours. (Volk will be back in Wisconsin for Mile of Music in Appleton at the beginning of August and we can’t wait to see them again.)

Volk and Electric Six played in Milwaukee the following night at Shank Hall (we chose the Green Bay date because we don’t like Shank) and the band crashed at our house. They finally got a chance to see the liquid-filled variant, which they hadn’t seen before, and signed our copy. Great folks, Volk!

*The official release on Romanus came out at the end of May and we will be getting another copy of Cashville, this time of the limited edition literal cash-filled vinyl variant as soon as it goes through production.

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King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard “Teenage Gizzard” 2020. Romanus Records, limited edition “splatter” variant. Recorded in 2010 and 2011, before their first  LP release, Teenage Gizzard is an “official bootleg” that compiles some of their early singles and an EP (Anglesea, 2011). The band released the digitial masters to anyone who wanted to press the album…and a TON of labels did, including my favorite Romanus. It’s lo-fi psychedelic stoner garage rock, a lot less polished than their current releases, but really excellent. Top tracks: the surfy, kinda psychobilly “Ants and Bats” (the b-side to the 2010 single “Hey There”), the garagey, pop and lo-fi catchy “Summer” (b-side to another 2010 single “Sleep”), the Link Wray-ish freakout “Fried” (from Anglesea), and the 60′s-style garage rock boppers “Good to Me” (also from Anglesea) and “Life is Cool.” And then the last track is Romanus Records own Chris Banta giving a shout-out thanks to King Gizzard and to all of us who are Romanus Records patrons 🥰

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