Pisse

picture by Tegoslucham

Pisse is a quartet from Hoyerswerda, Germany, which has been around since 2012 and plays some kind of a-bit-of-synth weird punk sung in german.
The kind of band with which you never really know where you are and have absolutely no idea where you going but you're ok for a ride anyway.

Theese guys already have quite a big discography so I am not going to go through each of their releases but just write a quick word about the "main" ones.

 

Their first "proper" release is a 2014 6-track 7" on Mamma Leone Records called Praktikum in der Karibik.

Basic, low-fi, with a decent dose of synth and some nice "punk explosion", the band, without having the maestro of today, has already found the "Pisse sound".

 

 In 2015 Pisse releases Mit Schinken durch die Menopause on Phantom Records (note that Phantom Records also released a super low-fi and weird Pisse kassette in 2014).
Well... at the time the band music was already hard to describe...the album starts like a Die Antwoord song before taking a sharp U-turn to a sequence of short punk songs with quite a lot of synth, oscillating between fast and mid tempos... can be a bit unsettling at first...

With Kohlrübenwinter (Turnip Winter) (released on different formats by Phantom Records, Harbinger Sound, Beau Travail, Gafas Del Rigor and In A Car) we are at the album which made me discover the band and made them quite "hype" around here.

In my opinion it's exactly the release where the band finally mastered its recipe; finding the right balance between punk guitar riffs, gang vocals and synth melody...
The dual "question/answer" vocals infuses a great energy to the lot and even if my german is a bit rusty these songs are obviously full of jokes and sarcasm ... and it's probably one of the reason why they became so popular in german speaking countries...

My favorite Pisse song:

Ok now let's pass Pisse's next couple of releases: the short Album Name (really guys?) and the also short Hornhaut ist der beste Handschuh ("Cornea is the best glove"??) which are still wandering on the weird synth punk map but with sometimes a darker post-punk vibe.

Latest Pisse release to date is a selft-titled full length out on, once again, Phantom Records and Harbinger Sound, in January 2020 and featuring ten new songs.

Starting with the fast and very punk Die Fetten Kinder, Pisse is taking us for a ride through some really diverse, but always breathtaking, landscapes... the weird and very german post punk Duracell, the almost hardcore Angenehm Staff, the very surfy ballads of Zu Viel Speed, the "very Pisse" synth punk of C02 Bilanz or Feind/Fehler... to finally conclude with the fun fair tango and chicken calls of Jenny L...

Probably less sarcastic, but still super efficient, the band is seriously keeping us in the dark all along... is there any plan? what the fuck are we doing here?... 
Helpless, blindfolded and speechless the only option we got left is to enjoy, until the end, the restless madness of the german punks...

You can listen to Pisse on Rien à Faire #8

picture by Laura Sophie

Rien à Faire is on FB

Fix - More is More LP

 

Ok let's take a step back today and focus a minute on one of the most underrated release of 2021 (or at least a release which didn't get the deserved coverage outside of the German-speaking world). Let's talk about Fix and their More is More LP (I'm gonna skip their 2019 self-titled 7" as most of their tracks are also on the 12").

Released on Phantom Records, home label of the great Schiach and Pisse among others, Fix features regulars from the German label who played in Ex-White, Sergeant Dennis, Schiach and others and who seem to be spread between Israel and Germany (the album's been recorded in Tel Aviv)... Actually I would not be surprised if the guy(s)/girl(s) behind Phantom were involved in this.

Let's not forget that the tape version of the album was released on Kuba Salami.

 

 

  While checking a few reviews about this album I've seen Dean Dirg mentioned a couple of times and it's true that when it comes to quality German fast punk these guys are at the top of the game (they totally blew me away years ago when I saw them live in Paris). But I wouldn't say that Fix is similar to Dean Dirg, ok they have the same kind of quite "clean and light" sound but even if they share (almost) the same name with one of the fastest first generation american hardcore punk band, they're far from being in the same kind of super fast punk shit as their compatriots.

 

More is More starts with a slow and dark synth intro which could evoke the beginning of a cheap vintage horror movie, the message is clear: what you're going to experience is an entertaining work of fiction and should not be taken seriously. Indeed Fix's tunes, made of biting guitars and very forward and in-your-face vocals switching between English and German, got titles like Basement, Not A Punk, Spazieren (Strolling), Baby I'm A Car or Super Garage Cocain Type which obviously express a kind of twisted sense of humour not without recalling the already mentioned Pisse.

 

 

artwork by Ricaletto

 But let's stop goofing around, I wouldn't want to look like I'm missing the point here: This album is very cool!

More is More is full of fun and catchy fast punk songs that will make your head bang and your mouth smile. Most tracks are less than one minute long so no time to get bored and just in case your ADHD would make you think of pressing "next" on your fucking smartphone, two synth interludes (based on the same kind of idea as the intro and the outro, yes that's the kind of record with an outro, dude) give you plenty of time to breath, make yourself a cup of fair trade coffee or a fucking quinoa salad before Sinn or Hot Pockets take your brain back to punk rock.

 But don't get me wrong, even if the track structures look deliberately simple, these 11 songs (if you don't count the synth instrumental parts) sound different enough not to feel like enduring the same old worn out joke over and over again, it's really enjoyable I'm telling ya!

Anyway let's stop here, listen to More And More and have a look at the Phantom Records catalogue if you're not familiar with it, you may find a couple of fun stuff worth of your time and your lonely quinoa salad night.

N,J'Oi!

 

    

Rien à Faire is on FB 

and INSTAGRAM

 

 

 

 

Schiach

 

Schiach is a quite mysterious German band claiming to be from Schkeuditz and which has been around since 2017 or something.

When I discovered the band in 2018 my mind immediately associated it with a label, Phantom Records, and with another very German band, Pisse. 

Indeed both bands got a very German touch, the main thing being the German language of course and the second thing being a strong sense of offbeat humour...

 

 

 And that's where the "mystery" comes into play.

All the songs from the 2018 LP are written and sung in what looks like Bavarian dialect or Bairisch (it's important to know that the south of Germany, Bavaria in particular, is famous for what other Germans consider as a very weird accent and is then source of countless jokes; we all have in our countries places where people speak "funny" right?) and from what I have read here and there it's not clear if this record is some Bavarian irony and/or German humour (?).

Claiming to be from a small town close to Leipzig (super far from Munich) it could actually be both.

As my German is definitely not good enough to understand the whole joke I will let the German speakers distinguish what is humour and what is not and let them decide if it's funny or not. 

 

This being said let's go back to the music!

Schiach is playing a great mix of upbeat post-punk and minimalist punk rock. 

A super sharp guitar sound, nice round bass lines in the background,  slamming drums, barking vocals with nevertheless a clear and clicking sound... the lot is delivering super tensed but super catchy songs.

The true (or fake?) Bavarians also know how to take a classy break with tracks like Gammler which catchy bass melody will make your head shake and your bum twist.

  This album got an 80s vibe all right... in the way the vocals sound ? in the way the whole thing sounds ? do we care ? No because this record will not bore you for a second from the start to finish. Expressing various feelings, from suppressed anger to sadness (Olle Gleich Schiach) through all the in-between mix (Leit, Ja Mei), your brain will not be stuck on one note and is it not what we are all looking for in a LP in the end? A variety of mixed feelings to slightly disturb our brain chemical balance ?

 

In 10 tracks the band wrote one of my favourite record of 2018 and at the time I included it in my Best of 2018 playlist. 

 

 

 

So you can imagine of excited I was when I heard that a new album was on the way two years later. Released once again on Phantom Records, 2 (great title) comes to the world only as a tape for now.

 

 

 

Well this not at all what I was expecting. 

Since the first note of  Des G'Schiagta Recht it's clear that the atmosphere has changed... a lot more melancholic, a lot more electronic as well. The band (which seems to be a duo scattered between Leipzig and Vienna after all) has chosen to keep the shout vocals but to change almost everything else: "Tchüss!" super guitar riffs, "herzlich willkommen" weird 80s drum machines, synths and dodgy late night clubs atmosphere!

 

Well if you've read a few of my reviews you may have noticed that my tastes in terms of new wave / Cold wave / EBM and all lame 80s goth / industrial music are very clear... NO WAY!... for most of it at least.

So yes it's not surprising that I am not seduced at all by this new album except for Feiawea and Disziplin which got a bit of the first LP clicking energy. 

 

  These 9 new songs will probably please a lot of people but not me unfortunately. I will never criticize a band for evolving, I really believe that change should not be avoided but embraced on the contrary, but sometimes it just does not do it for me at all (ok a loooot of people love Blitz's Second Empire Justice for example, I don't).

 

Too bad. There is still the first LP anyway! 

 

 

You can listen to Schiach on Rien à Faire #16.

 

 

Rien à Faire is on FB 

and INSTAGRAM

 

  

Pitva

 

Pitva is a noisy-punk quartet hailing from Vienna, Austria.  

Dominik, the singer, is from Czech republic though and most of (all?) the lyrics are in Czech (Pitva means Autopsy). Dominik seems to be the very active type, I won't even try to mention all the projects he's been involved in, but he was/is part of several Black Metal influenced bands like Parasite Dreams and Smuteční Slavnost (Funeral party) but is also in Autor (I reviewed their debut release very briefly two years ago) and in Urban Lurk, not a band but a tape label and show promoter based in Vienna.

Standing behind the synth is Robert Pawliczek, a german visual artist and musician who plays/played in a bunch of bands you probably have heard of like Heavy Metal, Bobby Would, Schiach, Privat and Agir (I've probably missed a few), he also manages an "artist run off space" called Drive-In / Drive-Thru and is involved in a label and distro called Quality Music. Yes the man's been busy.

Raphael, the drummer, is not the idle type either and he's spent years exploring various musical genres (from black metal to dark-wave and post-punk). He is the drummer for Parasite Dreams but also the man behind Rosa Nebel and plays in Gates of Londra, Phantom Gold and Peace Vaults. He is also the other half of Urban Lurk with Dominik.

The guitarist, aka Johnny Brise, seems to be obsessed with Metal, he played/plays in Death Racer, Hagzissa, Kringa, Forgotten Shrines and other loud acts which are light-years away from my musical interests... 

Anyway you got the point, these guys obviously didn't grab their first guitar/drum kit/whatever last week end... so what do we have here on the postmortem table?

 

Pitva's demo was released at the end of 2018 on the Prague-based label Stoned To Death and let me be straight, I'm not going to spend much time reviewing it. I discovered the demo after I listened to their self-titled LP, which is a completely different story, and the demo black metal infused vocals is a straight NO NO for me, I just can't stand it. So yes this first release sounds closer to Parasite Dreams, and all that black metal stuff Dominik is fond of, than what came next. Give it a try if you're into that kind of stuff, I'm not.

So here is what deserves your full attention in my opinion, Pitva's recent (2022) self-titled LP released on the super cool Berlin-based label Static Age.

At first I didn't really understand the cover picture (wtf?), and then I remembered what Pitva means (I told you at the very beginning of this post!) and the whole thing instantly made sense! (thank you dear Google Translation).

Ok here were are, forget about the lousy Black Metal shit, this record is something else!

To be honest I had to listen to this LP A LOT to be able to really figure it out, yes it starts a bit like a noisy but bass-less punk band, the synth building up a dark and gloomy atmosphere made of distorted layers on which the guitar nails acute and haunting melodies. The vocals and the drums counterpoint all of this, keeping the burning anger right in your ugly face, Dominik screams and shouts while Raphael keeps it sharp and fast. The whole noisy punk vibe made me first thought of Bathouse (even if the bass is a big part of the swedes' noise and not of Pitva's) and the comparison's not completely irrelevant in my opinion but limiting Pitva to that is way too narrow.

 Indeed, from the third track onwards, the record turns into something else, something that sounds colder, something that sounds a lot more "disillusioned", something that sounds very German in my opinion and recalls dirtier versions of Maske and, even more recently, of Die Verlierer.

But don't get me wrong, the noisy coldness "à la" Einstürzende Neubauten (the freezing cold Pytlak!) and the eastern anger from "behind the iron curtain" hardcore bands (Odpadki Civilizacije was mentioned somewhere, even if Pitva doesn't swim in the same kind of waters) are never very far. On Bestie the band even takes us halfway between Indus and cold-wave before diving back into a fast and cold synth punk. 

But the main question in the end is always the same. Is it good? Do I like it? Yes and Yes I do but beware, don't be fooled by the "punkitude" of the first two tracks, the whole thing is a lot darker, gloomier and cold than what you might expect at first, yes, this album is a grower! The kind you're going to love coming to again and again.

Probably the best disturbing and noisy record to come out on Static Age since the amazing Walking Korpses LP!

 

 

N,J'Oi!

 

 

 

 

You can listen to Pitva on Rien à Faire #33.

 

  

 

 

Rien à Faire is on FB 

and INSTAGRAM

 

 

 

 

Laxisme

 

You may have heard of Phantom Records while digging in some weird (but great) german punk bands like Schiach and Pisse or while enjoying some skilled noise/post-hardcore bands like Dewaere (Salut Patrick!) or Melt Downer but today I'm gonna write a few words about another kind of blues produced by the German label... French punk rock!

 

 

 

From the very first seconds of  L'étau I knew I had heard this voice somewhere else, this guy has a very distinctive voice tone and way of singing you don't easily forget. Damn but where was it? It rang a bell for sure but a very distant one you know... so I had to dig...

At first I thought of the 2000s/2010s "77 punk revival" scene (you know, these guys wearing striped t-shirts, sunglasses and badges bigger than their heads who caught PTSD at a Briefs' show) which, in France, happened to be mainly based in Marseille at the time. Yes these guys were playing in bands like The Hatepinks and The Irritones and were really close to the Marseille-based label Relax-O-Matic (which fortunately managed to get out of this niche afterwards).

 

 Anyway that's what not exactly what I was looking for, so I kept digging in my memories and my hard drives and thought of La Flingue but no... that was still not it... and finally I stumbled across La Vase (a "french" punk rock band from Leipzig, Germany, yes that's a bit weird) and that was it! That was the same guy behind the mic for sure!

From there it was easy to trace the trail and fall back on my original intuition: the Marseille connection! Indeed this guy (let's call him Kevin) used to sing in the great 77 garagish punk band The Aggravation (they released a great split with the great Defenestrors and a great LP, check them out!).

 

The band features also Jean-Baptiste Meyrieux, who's been behind the scene of numerous French (but not only) bands' recording sessions for the past five years or so (Litovsk, Douche Froide, Short Days and more) and has traded his mixing table for the drums here, and Billie from The Harry Anslingers (another fast and slightly melodic punk rock band from Leipzig named after the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics who did not get famous for his liberals opinions).

So yeah Laxisme (laxity/permissiveness in French) is from Leipzig as well (Kevin lives there now I suppose, not a bad place for punk rock I guess) and got the same kind of vibe The Aggravation and La Vase had, it's pure well-played high energy punk rock and it's in French! Highly enjoyable I may say...

So if you don't mind a bit of melody in your punk and a bit of French kiss in your classics, you're definitely at the right place!

N,J'Oi!

 

Voir cette publication sur Instagram

Une publication partagée par Mag Ocy (@mag.ocy)

 

   

You can listen to Laxisme on RAF#26.

 

 

 

 

Rien à Faire is on FB 

and INSTAGRAM