Debt Rag

Reviews

Debt Rag It Is Clear What’s Going On LP

New LP from Olympia’s DEBT RAG featuring atonal, no-wave-inspired punk jams that comfortably ride the line between playful and pretentious. Sonically akin to ERASE ERRATA or NAPE NECK, the tracks feel improvisational at times, like on “Drumbo” and “Drumbo 2,” where it feels like listening in on the band working out promising syncopated drum loops, and buzzing art-punk at others, like “Cold Kitchenette,” a blaze of fierce snare downbeats and call- and-response hooks that sounds like a lost MELT BANANA outtake. It’s fun and weird and occasionally funky, but probably impossible to dance to. The short tracks and experimental stabs at ideas (a crawling sax solo on “Fish of the Week” with Tomata du Plenty-aping yelps, the somewhat traditionally structured synth punk on “Gary’s World”) consistently confound expectations and evoke a group of talented oddballs having fun together. What could be better?

Debt Rag Lost to the Fantasy LP

The three humans behind the mid-2010s Oakland noisy avant-punk group WET DRAG have all since relocated to Olympia, WA and recently rekindled the project as DEBT RAG—apparently the Bay Area isn’t the only thing they’ve left behind, as they’ve completely ditched guitar on their debut LP Lost to the Fantasy, weaving layers of seasick synth, sharp blurts of trumpet, and all sorts of clattering percussion (full-force cowbell!) into some of the ample negative space newly liberated from six-string oppression. Everyone contributes vocals, with lines overlapping and intersecting in an almost anti-call-and-response just as often as they coalesce into sardonic gang-chants (the collective statement behind “Barf on USA” is brilliantly direct and self-explanatory), drums are reduced to the barest minimum (one tom and one cymbal) and pounded out in sparse, tranced-out patterns, and calculated, ping-ponging bass forms the primary structure for DEBT RAG to build up their sideways art-skronk collages. How many other bands in our modern day and age are capable of triggering thoughts within me of NOH MERCY, DANNY AND THE PARKINS SISTERS, or Y PANTS, let alone all of the above within the span of a single song?! The answer is zero. DEBT RAG for president, barf on USA.