punk this week: station model violence, draümar, landowner + 15 more

Hey, it’s Punk This Week, see/saw’s rundown of the latest and greatest punk & rock'n'roll records. If you’ve ever enjoyed the works of Total Control or R.M.F.C., it is time to accept Station Model Violence into your heart. There are excellent records out this week by DRAÜMAR, Landowner, odex, and Dog Chocolate. There’s a benefit comp stacked with egg punk greats. As always, there’s astounding music being made by new projects across the world. It’s another very good week for this shit.

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Station Model Violence: Station Model Violence [Anti Fade/Static Shock]

During an interview surrounding the release of Total Control’s Typical System in 2014, DX introduced me to E.M. Cioran’s Anathemas and Admirations. I’ve picked it up a few times, read a bit, and put it back down. I’ve carried it on planes where it sat in my bag uncracked. I’ve digested the writer’s appraisal of Fitzgerald’s Crack-Up (and otherwise skewering of Fitzgerald’s earlier writing), but little else. A dozen years later, Station Model Violence are invoking the writer William Gass and declaring that it’s time for all of us to live our hate out loud. I’ll never read through DX’s bookshelf, but what a privilege to live with another stunning work featuring his stamp.

Many songs from Station Model Violence are born of DX and Michael (from Den)’s earlier band KX Aminal. At some point DX started making stuff with Buz from R.M.F.C. The promise of all these minds working together sounded excellent on paper, even better on the single-length version of “Heat,” and is a fucking revelation across the album’s full runtime. Station Model Violence is fronted by DX’s deep but vulnerable voice, always seeming to offer guidance: “face the sky” or “learn to hate in the light of day.” It’s not just how the words “I can taste the sun” sound aspirational in a vacuum—it’s hearing the absolutely fucking beatific sonic context that sentiment glows from within. The 12-string guitars, that tone that feels like it’s buzzing from a Bowie/Eno Berlin session, echoing horns, and perhaps most crucially, its bolstering and even regenerative percussive pulse. 

So much about this album at first blush is straight-up devotional—their repetition-driven impulses that feel geared for meditation or movement. There’s this other piece to it—this lowkey impishness that’s pretty apparent on their ripper “Drip Away” (“a beautiful song about your meat melting under surveillance”). DX wrote that they were inspired by Iggy’s term “pastoral psychedelicism.” Crucially, they were also inspired by the visual of Iggy saying those words while sitting spread eagle on the beach drilling holes into coconuts. That’s what this album feels like—some of Australian punk’s best minds delivering something searching and confident while grinning in broad daylight.