Xray Xeroxx Art Rock! cassette
XRAY XEROXX brings medium-fi garage punk that is stylistically all over the place. The first two tracks revel in thick, fuzzy chord progressions with catchy, gruff vocals, resulting in grunge-meets-garage Warped Tour fodder—essentially NOFX with a Big Muff pedal, which is probably a cup of tea quite a few people enjoy. The second half sucks in a different way. Not to weaponize the band name, but “Art Rock!” and “1.21 Jiggawatts” sound like cheap, bad copies of quirky egg-punk bands without the nervous weirdo energy and rawness that make the microgenre tolerable. The tracks feel calculated and inauthentic, and while snappy with their squiggly synths and jerky vocals, smack of forgettable genre tourism. Lyrics to “Art Rock!” say, “Is this new wave or no wave? / Who’s to say? / Is this grunge, is it shoegaze? / Is it cliche? / Is this new wave or no wave? / Who’s to say either way? / But would I listen to it? / No way!” Yeah, same.