You (may) have heard of "Crime Jazz" but have you heard any "Crime Rock"?

Skurkarna play rough and tumble instro tunes with clips from noir and crime movies interspersed throughout. Very seedy. For English speakers scratching their heads at the name, I've gathered from the internet that Skurkarna is the plural of Skurk, which is Swedish slang for a villain or scoundrel.

Two Gremmy Award nominees (one of them a winner) are getting some nice reissues that should let them reach a deservedly wider audience.

It's been a good while since Los Plantronics' excellent 2011 LP "Organic Voodoo Soup", so they've gotten the ball rolling again by releasing a new 7" called Shortnin Bread. The namesake of the 7" is the same Shortnin' Bread you've heard plenty of times (with vocals) but it also includes "Navajo" which is exactly the sort of big-production high-energy surf I love to hear from these guys.

There's a video for Shortnin Bread on the way, but perhaps more importantly they've promised an LP called "Surfin' Times" later this year!

I wasn't really sure if Steelism was the sort of group this site should be concerned with when I saw that their LP "615 to Fame" was coming out. I saw it at Louisiana Music Factory and thought "what the hey". Glad I did, it's a pretty great album. Obviously there's a good helping of steel guitar, but they definitely also carry pretty heavy surf influences, with flashes of jazz, country, spy, and there's a surprising amount of fuzz too. It's clever and diverse stuff.

So hot off the heels of that, they have a limited edition 7" coming out tomorrow Turbo Time Records. You can preview one of the tracks below or order it.

North Carolina's Krektones have a new 7" with 4 swaggering, saucy intrumentals full of danger. A lotta trumpet in here, which you don't see all that often, backed up by some raw and ragged guitar. You can preview it and purchase it on bandcamp

Just lookit that cover art! I love it! Aloha Screwdriver have released a new 4-song EP on purple and black vinyl. They've got one of the tracks on soundcloud and it's nice and punchy.