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It’s rare that a Daughn Gibson release avoids my year-end top ranking. Since All Hell<\/i> in 2012, no one has done it as strangely and memorably as he, and while I’m happy to count him as a personal friend, you’re not reading this blog because you want a middle-of-the-road year-end recap of the same crap everyone else “coincidentally” noticed, you want this one specific guy’s opinion! But even if I never met Dee Gibs, his music, more bizarre and singular than ever, would strike a chord deep within me. Like prior releases, Kriminelle Energie<\/i> is meticulously assembled, this time from a bevy of life-like MIDI controls as opposed to samples. It sounds like the first AI rock group to receive a human heart transplant, uneasily seductive and unnervingly real<\/i>. These songs are catchy at first but continue to grow on you, full of precise detail and references both arcane and hyper-modern. Music for the dark web, no doubt; these are songs that should’ve only been discovered via links in comments on Pornhub videos and bitcoin URLs. It’s certainly Gibson’s most political work yet, though political in the way that Denis Johnson is political: he lays out compelling characters caught in fantastic situations and lets the audience figure out what it all means. And in the most striking\/confounding fashion, Gibson put Kriminelle Energie<\/i> up on Spotify and Bandcamp in June, only to pull it from streaming a couple months later. Is he the first artist to do an actually-limited digital release, as opposed to leaving everything available for free in perpetuity? Why aren’t the youth doing this? You’ll absolutely want to hear “Fuckin American”, but if you haven’t already, you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way: digging around on Limewire, trading MP3s with other faceless strangers across the digital expanse.<\/p>\n![](\"\/images\/522straw.jpg\")
It’s never been easier than now to make great punk music. Everyone has whittled down what works best, concentrating the finest aspects of the classics alongside a handful of acclaimed flexis and demos into punk music that would score straight As were punk a test based on technical merit. The real challenge is to make exciting<\/i> punk music, songs that haven’t already been written a hundred times over but instead feel vibrant and newly alive (while still firmly being actual punk music and not something else entirely). Few can do it, especially in 2022, but Straw Man Army are one of the finest to do it today. I loved their debut album, and SOS<\/i> is even sharper, a righteous stab of tender fury. In the way that SOS<\/i> exists in the proud lineage of killer punk, I hear a mix of Crass Records-style anthemic rancor alongside H\u00fcsker D\u00fc’s melodic prowess, early Bad Religion and the speedy art-punk of Uranium Club, though Straw Man Army have such a singularly definable style that their music is immediately recognizable as their own, from the weird synth\/nature interludes to the dazzling drumming and rapid-fire vocal\/guitar attack. The tunes are incredible, and they’re driven home by Straw Man Army’s staunchly DIY (or at least “Do It With Your Community”) approach, far removed from pro-tude band photos, an attention-seeking social media presence or slimy corporate collaborations. Straw Man Army’s form of punk isn’t delicately-assembled window dressing, it’s a thrilling and inspiring force of will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"