Still Wet

at Outsider Writers Carbon-Based Lifeform Blues.

BOKKUS is Alive

BOKKUS is Dead
by No Regrets Coyote 

Spaghetti Spaghetti Records

released 15 May 2012

There’s something going on in Nashville. It has nothing to do with country music, thank jeebus. Young hard-ass rockers on small labels have begun making names for themselves, most hard-assly, JEFF The Brotherhood and Diarrhea Planet. No Regrets Coyote has stepped up and continues the next wave of the assault. These guys look like they’re 15 but I guess youth is good if you have it. I haven’t had it in a while, but I’m reminded by this band what it was like. Their debut EP, Bokkus Is Dead, is a five-song ear-scratcher that energizes as it destroys. The production is as rough as the guitar tracks are addictive, the Diarrhea Planet-like vocals gargling out existential quandaries (“I’m drunk and I can’t bum a cigarette”, “Is there any way you can get your shit together?”) amidst a splattering of minor-chord mayhem. I guess what I like most about Bokkus is that at its grungiest, it sounds like a much more raw, less introspective, sped-up and punked-out version of Superdrag’s seminal 1996 debut, Regretfully Yours (before they got all stupid-trippy and god-squady, respectively) especially the EP’s last and best track, “Slow Burn,” a song I have no idea what it’s about but have been playing it obsessively to the detriment of sleep and what little health remains in my later years. And dare I say that there are echoes in the guitar tones of early Pavement but catchier? I dare. Anything that harkens back to the MTV “Buzz Bin” era is a good thing and No Regrets Coyote is a great thing. Get on this ship and enjoy the sink. This band should be big, as long as they don't find religion. 

Monkeytown review copies. christopher.vola@gmail.com.