Flat Worms, Warm Drag, Dreamdecay
Recommended
Members of the Los Angeles trio Flat Worms have done time with Ty Segall, Oh Sees, Sic Alps, and the Babies. But this unimpeachable resume is bound to give people ideas—<i>wrong</i> ideas that Flat Worms gleefully demolish. The band isn’t some stale spin-off contentedly catching the last wave of 21st-century garage-rock revivalism. It’s a wild and wooly beast of its own, a pummeling force that recalls the dark strain of early ’80s punk that traded suburban angst for creeping dread and paranoia. You probably couldn’t sneak a Flat Worms song onto a mixtape between T.S.O.L. and the Wipers and pass it off as a Reagan-era artifact, but the band definitely rides a modern-day version of the same creeped-out vibe that made their forebears such powerful agents of chaos.
by Chris Stamm