Labels: Fast Crowd Records
Review by: Joe Callaghan
God on a goalpost, what an awful, awful band name. I’m sure there is some pant-shittingly hilarious explanation behind it, which would make me chortle until my face bled. Perhaps it’s an ultra elite in-joke, or a quote from some toilet humour stoner comedy or whatever. I don’t really care. It’s just inexcusable. There’s a bottomless pit of acceptable or even slightly forgettable band names that won’t tick any of the wrong boxes, but this. I just don’t even know what to do about this. It kind of made me not want to even listen to it, almost like the Over Stars and Gutters record did. Just reading the sleeve of that almost made my hair turn black. Regular Size People Fight makes me think of all of them wearing matching t shirts with LOL printed on the front. I hate fun.
Regular Size Peo”¦ You know what? I’m not calling them that. It’s fucking stupid. No. In this review, I’m going to refer to them as THE BASTARDS, from now on. Not in a derogatory sense. It’s just easier.
Yowza, an 8 tracker by noisy punk rock upstarts THE BASTARDS is as messy as it is fun. It’s got all the rudiments of brash, stocky punk rock, but it’s thrown up in the air until it is almost unrecognisable. THE BASTARDS structure their songs almost incoherently, but retaining energy and giving plenty of fist-pumping opportunities. I can only imagine that THE BASTARDS really pedal this energy live. Perhaps all jumping in the air at the same time, or standing on the bass drum whilst punching their guitar or needlessly smashing cymbals with their hands. Early I Farm, particularly the Sincerely Robots LP, shares a lot of resemblance to THE BASTARDS, with the general discordance and plain old rule-breaking of standard song writing. Hell, I Farm and THE BASTARDS are both terrible band names also, so it’s certainly a very valid comparison. There are only 8 tracks, and the songs are sensibly short, so the chances of THE BASTARDS wearing you thin are quite slim. It’ll be in and out before you know it, so you can’t grumble.
And yes, of course I would have used their band name that many times even if I wasn’t replacing it with THE BASTARDS.