#nylex

Words on some new & recently unearthed recordings from Plastic EP & the Records, Nylex, Blowdryer, Germ House & Far Corners, from Maximum Rocknroll #423 (August 2018). 

On their debut 45 from 1981, Melbourne’s PLASTIC EP and the RECORDS crashed through a whole jumble of outsider DIY reference points, where Nuggets-on-a-budget garage stomp with a wobbly organ collided with the economical punk of first-wave UK bands like the SUBWAY SECT. It’s a holy grail obscurity of the early ‘80s Aussie weirdo underground, but it turns out that the group’s most flipped-out sounds were actually committed to tape shortly after the release of the first record, intended for a two-song follow-up single that never materialized due to the studio losing the masters. Luckily for all of us, PLASTIC EP and crew had dubbed rough mixes of the songs to cassette, and they’ve finally seen the light of day as proper 7” (alongside a combined reissue of the first 45 and 1982’s New Wave-ish “Secret Love” single, by which time they’d changed their name to the EPs) thanks to a new Australian label called Xerox Music. A-side “Well You Want to Make A Record” is total untrained post-punk madness, in which PLASTIC EP and the RECORDS ditch their original drummer for the clatter of a Dr. Rhythm drum machine, add some wild, buzzsaw guitar scrape, and top it with deadpan hollering about how to make a record (“add a bit of bass / not so much snare!”), which basically winds up sounding like some long-lost electro-punk successor to the DESPERATE BICYCLES’ do-it-yourself incantations. On the flip, “I’m Not Coming Back” is more subdued in an off-kilter TELEVISION PERSONALITIES kind of way, with psychedelic meandering piano only slightly tempering the frenetic drum machine pulse and flurry of distorted guitar. A lost classic, and very much in line with the shambolic and surreal industrial art-punk that the equally great SUNDAY PAINTERS were crafting several hours away in Wollongong during the same era, if you’d like to do some further digging. (Xerox Music, xeroxmusicaustralia.bandcamp.com)

Outside of the FALL, PYLON have arguably been the most important band in shaping and influencing every conception that I have of what could be considered the post-punk ideal. I’ve made references in the past to PYLON bassist Michael Lachowski’s assertion that the group’s primary intention was to make art with instruments, and just as modern art is often dismissed as something that could be easily recreated by anyone due to the seeming simplicity of its technique or forms, PYLON’s brilliantly minimalist art-punk approach seems to be evoked as a misguided comparison for more and more contemporary bands just because they also happen to have an affinity for mutant disco rhythms or sharp, brittle stabs of guitar. So a PYLON reference isn’t something that I drop casually, but if anyone is deserving of one these days, it’s this new quartet from Adelaide, Australia called NYLEX, whose self-titled debut cassette has all of the tightly-wound and danceable tension of Gyrate, with the addition of some goth-leaning smudged eyeliner melancholy. The shimmering guitar and ethereal, shadowy melodies in “Heavy Air” and “Against the Knife” conjure some serious early 4AD-level drama, but it’s the dark and understated but deeply propulsive basslines that really give each of the tape’s six songs their shape, allowing the vocals plenty of space to zig-zag from subtle whispers to stern, obliquely dissociated narrations. And when they’re at their most stark and jagged (see: “Fascinate” or “Decide”), NYLEX’s coolly restrained post-punk paranoia really does draw a perfectly shaky line directly from Athens in 1980 to Adelaide in 2018. (Tenth Court, nylextenthcourt.bandcamp.com)

Philadelphia’s BLOWDRYER are back with a self-titled tape consisting of their first new recordings since 2014’s Deprogrammed cassette, and they’ve apparently spent the last few years stripping their previous sugar-spiked, BREEDERS-ish noise-pop framework into some seriously taut nouveau-wave. The fuzzed-out group harmonies in the relative jangly “Over and Over” help connect the dots between BLOWDRYER and guitarist Sarah Everton’s previous band BLEEDING RAINBOW, but it’s a relative outlier this time around, as the anxious, jittery precision of songs like “Underdeveloped” and “Photocopy” more often suggests early WIRE as translated by modern punk women in a basement with a four-track machine. Lyrical phrases are shouted out and repeated like anti-slogans pulled from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series (“you know I’m well aware of my self-satisfaction,” or “your life is in balance, you have total control”), backed by needling slashes of guitar and bashed drums for some of the best lo-fi URINALS-besotted racket since the arrival of those first two NOTS singles, before they tumbled down the synth-punk path. Really hope it takes them a little less than four years to put something else out after this one... (blowdryer.bandcamp.com)