Reviews

Fettkakao

Cliquey Bitches Scorpio Scorpio 12″

This synth-pop supergroup features Alice Bag, Allison Wolfe, and Seth Bogart, three seasoned musicmakers collaborating to create pared-down, catchy pop anthems that rarely pass the two-minute mark, and will be cycling through your head for days to come. Fans of BRATMOBILE and GRAVY TRAIN!!!! will likely dig CLIQUEY BITCHES—the fingerprints of Seth and Allison are all over this thing, with the genius addition of Alice Bag on keys and backing vox. It’s the soundtrack to a spiked punch dance party, delivering inclusive messages, melodic group vocals, and a snare hit that doesn’t quit.

Lime Crush Timewaster EP

In three joyous, sub-two-minute bursts, the 2015 debut 7” from Vienna, Austria’s LIME CRUSH plotted a perfect equilateral triangle of playfully shambolic art-punk, Slampt-descended boy/girl revolutionary agit-pop, and an unraveling Girls in the Garage ’60s beat—on their new Timewaster EP, those angles have been stretched into somewhat tighter and more acute points, but they’re still bashing out some of the most ecstatic Alpine econo-punk racket this side of KLEENEX. Drummer Andi Dvořák takes the lead on the garage pop A-side “Timewaster” (a sonic successor to the band’s previous cover of LOVE’s “Can’t Explain”), his shouts foiled by slightly melancholic, girl-group-styled backing vocals; on the B-side, “Park” sticks most closely to the anxious twang-and-jangle of the first LIME CRUSH EP, quickly snapping from a bass-and-spoken-word intro to a breathless rush of galloping drums and girl-gang harmonies, and “Téléphone,” with its cyclic, snaking bass groove and matter-of-fact narrative vocals, almost strikes me as a meditative, soft-edged inversion of GAUCHE’s fiery dance-punk calls-to-arms. No time wasted here.