In case any of y'all were curious about my surf LPs, I made a post on reddit. For surf veterans, you probably won't be amazed. I was trying to go over some of the basics and give an introduction to the music as well as show off some of the nice stuff. If you're curious about any of these, feel free to ask!
The comments in the section were full of people that were curious about surf... and I got a bunch of recommendations for groups I'd never heard of.
Robotron is a project by Bjørn Hovland featuring 7 tracks of monstrous fuzzed out tough surf. While a lot of these projects where one member writes and plays many parts tend to sound stripped down, this gives no indication based on the music itself. Partially because this was hardly a bedroom recording: Bjorn hails from Norway, the album was mixed in Brazil and mastered in Seattle!
The Grave Diggers play generally aggressive punk-influenced surf with tinges of horror surf. Those tinges are especially noticeable in the back-to-back Ghastly Ones covers. But this is a pretty fun record, they definitely know how to keep up a great energy and pump out a lot of sound for a threesome. Ontop of nice guitarism, they have a bunch of small little tweaks, sound effects, and quirks that add another level of interestingness. This isn't exactly the flashiest cover art -- with something a little more noticeable I think they'd deserve to get noticed.
The Grande Bois have been a pretty ambitious group since their first release and they're just as inventinve and frenetic on their third LP. Though their album art often deals in horror movie camp, they don't really come off as a horror surf band (especially on sleepy tracks like "Shy Groove", a straight sunset surf tune). Rather, they roll around in strange fiction tropes with playfulness. It gives them a good variety, sometimes playing it straight and sometimes getting pretty goofy and punctuating a song with cow moos.
King Ghidora's been on my radar for a while, but I never caught wind of any prior releases apart from reverbnation updates and the like. Even if it's 3 songs, I'm glad to finally have this band in my library. King Ghidora hail from the Man or Astro-Man branch of the instro family tree, and I reckon they probably prefer the later material. KG's style is aggressive but progressive, with tracks 2 and 3 stretching into prog-psych-surf territory at 6 minute lengths. That's long for surf!
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