Terry Malts (Noah)

I’ve been scared for a long while that the circular rhythms of music were going to drag us through a period of time some call the mid-90s … or as I like to call it, the darkest days in my music-listening career. A time when punk rock fused with power-pop and the skanking and pickling of ska slowly crept in to the mainstream. Regardless of my fear though, the slow plodding behemoth called music shuffles endlessly forward, dredging up that which has come before and turning it into modern music. Thus when someone told me that Terry Malts, a new project that features all of the Magic Bullets, was “straight-up punk like you’d hear in the early 90s” I cringed. Cringed at the implication that punk was triple-jumping back in to my peripheral vision and already dreading that which would follow.

Terry Malts, though clearly influenced by the more palatable forms of punk rock, is downright fantastic. Short, sharp, gritty songs duct taped together with the neurosis-inflicted vocals of Phil Benson – this is the punk rock that grabbed my prepubescent hand and dragged me down the long, strange rabbit hole of music. And you know what, if this is the flag-bearer for a new wave of tatted out punks sneering their way through every song and if that leads to another wave of kids playing trombones while a guy in a suit dances on stage left and that leads to a band claiming that their biggest influence is Reel Big Fish, well, I guess that’s music. Before that occurs, I’ll just sit back and listen to I Do (from Killing Time) a couple hundred more times.

:Terry Malts – I Do: