Though the Phantom Operators never keep you waiting long for more material, this is the second full-length from the Tennessee-based group. When listening to them, there's one word that comes to mind: desolate. The guitars go on and on, but with a bit of a melancholy and not so much of that California brightness. It fits the desert theme that runs thoughout much of the Phantom Operators' material.

Here are 11 originals from Italy's Surfoniani. They've got upright bass, some very drippy guitar and drums, which gel into a bright and sunny modern trad sound. They've got a fair amount of beach party shakers like "Bikini", "Mai Tai Girl", and "Tiki Twist" though also a few cooler ones like "Red Waves". Give it a listen!

Amphibian Man released an LP less than three months ago, so I certainly wasn't expecting more from them, but I'm glad we got this one. "Speed Power Turbo Racer" also happens to be the name of all four tracks on this, and they all get the point across - this is 100% about speed and power to an almost overwhelming extent. Once you get settled a little bit, there are actually some good melodies driving these songs, and at 4 tracks it's over before it's too much -- unless you find it's too much immediately! Really fun EP from these guys and it's completely free to download.

Les Surfsonics play with a little distortion here and there but a traditional mindset. Most of these are covers, but played with gusto and a good sense of fun. I'm kind of surprised that they keep a steady pace for most of them, as their fastest song "Tidal Wave" works really well! It's their first recording, and it's a solid foundation for where they might go from here.

I don't know too much about Kozyol - despite being based in Portaldn, I'm guessing at least one of their members is Russian, which would explain why some of these songs are in what I assume to be Russian. Definitely pretty funny for me, writing this on a trip to the nation of Georgia and having just gotten back from the Stalin museum. That really doesn't have anything to do with anything.

The Moths keep at a pretty quick pace both musically and in terms of a release schedule, with 3 releases since last January. Like those others, this is aggressive, loud, and rude. The Moths are only a 3-piece, so they rule with tight playing and power rather than intricacy and composition. And that's fine, they do it well. Free download, give it a try.

Though recently released, this one is actually pretty old! I'll go ahead and quote their bandcamp page here.

Here is our Incredably difficult second release which has taken nine years to actually release. We got carried away with the recording by using way to many mics on the guitar amp and way too many takes multi tracking and adding extra instruments computers were a lot slower nine years ago and we ended up with an over welming 26 Gigabytes of sound files.

Spaghetti Western and surf have become closer and closer friends in the 2000's and onward, to the point where by now surf groups have taken the guitar parts of Morricone, broken them down and rearranged them so much as to have built their own vocabulary with them. What I'm saying is that while there's a recognizable Spaghetti Western sound to Los Tiros, nobody is mistaking them for a Sergio Leone soundtrack. It's much wilder, much less restrained, more horsepower (hee haw), more punk than Morricone would ever even think about. And that's not only fine, it rules.

This is the debut album from The Syndicate, and it features a slew of covers from punk legends like the Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Seeds, The Dictators. Despite those clear influences, the resulting sound is definitely more surf than punk, full of reverb and twang and adding a brightness and spaciousness to songs that often didn't have them in their original form. If you didn't know what you were listening to, you might not even realized it's a cover the first time you hear it --and that's a good thing.

As far as I can tell this is the first non-demo release from Mexico's La Venganza de San Carlos. It's some good ol' no-bullshit high-energy surf with a punk influence. It's there to make a racket and hopefully get you to spasm a bit. Sometimes that's all I really want from surf -- that was often the case in the 60's, and even though it sounds different today there's still some people out there making the same unassuming but fun stuff. Give it a listen, have some fun, it's a free download!