by Myles Dunhill (@MylesDunhill)
Ripping past at two-hundred mph and clocking in at a little over thirty minutes, Flat Worms, a three-piece from Los Angeles, unleashes their first LP on Castle Face and it is chock-full of the kind of raw power that would make devotees to the genre bow down in reverence. This is sheer balls-to-the-wall pummeling garage punk that is sure to blow the lint from your belly button as soon as the first wails of feedback make their presence known.
Kicking off this party record, "Motorbike," is the gunshot heard right before the footrace and the album doesn’t let up or stop for gas from here on out. The follow-up, "Goodbye Texas," stylistically and lyrically sounds like an outtake from a Parquet Courts album only injected with way more force and drive. Other cuts like "11816" with its memorable chorus or "Faultline" with that groovy main guitar-line, lodge themselves in your brain and refuse to let go. While the closing track, "Red Hot Sand," may be the longest track on this short album, it does its best to disintegrate any remaining sensations left in your flayed ear canals.
The band’s noise-saturated guitar distortion punctuates these ten melodic shredders with howls and screeches, adding finishing touches where any empty space needs to be filled. One can really grasp a sense of what this group’s beer-drenched live shows must be like as this recording is polished enough to obtain a certain sense of clarity but gritty enough to capture the true essence of primal energy being showcased here.
For a debut record, this may be one of the strongest and tightest batch of songs cementing this band as something to keep an eye on. If you don’t find yourself flipping this record over and over and over, then you’re really not surrendering to all of the energy that this album disposes like a busted vending machine stocked full of Four Loko. Throw this one on during that all-night rager you’ve been planning and after the chaos settles see how easy it is to wipe that big dumb grin off your face.