This year we've crowned the sickest throb we've been privileged to come across, while searching high and low for the best new music, and we've just gotta hand it to the long-awaited debut LP Dogging from Low Life, from Sydney, Australia. Finished way back in 2012, the debut LP was slated for release on Brendon Annesly's Negative Guest List label, but was sadly sidetracked due to Annesly's untimely death. An uncategorizable yet instantly intimidating mess of snarling post punk, gripping Murder Punk, and exhilarating synth pop, seamlessly interwoven into eight songs of lascivious madness, perfectly unaffected yet slovenly vocals and some of the realest punk music you're going to hear anywhere else this year. The unsettling kind of punk music where you really have to watch your back, the real sound of dangerous people playing to the demons in their heads as their only way to not claw through humanity like monstrosities of the lowest order.
It's charmingly thuggish and beyond exciting on tracks such as "Speedball" and "D.N.A." and rides the rails alongside early Australian snot-brutes Thought Criminals so well you might have to make sure you're not living in some other plane of reality. But the way Low Life balances this pummeling derelict force with an almost delicately danceable synth pop track, is truly their secret weapon on Dogging, where the long-format allows breathing room for expansion and allows their insidious intricacies to flood forward into all of your vulnerable orifices. Along with the debut LP from Ruined Fortune, it's a downer punk masterpiece of the blackest grade, and if you loved Total Control's latest album, you will flip out HARD on Low Life, so don't let the closed-circuit camera blowjob cover shot turn you away from one of the most remarkably bleak and impressively impenetrable masterpieces of modern Australian underground music.
Be sure to check out Low Life (as well as their earlier Nevada Strange chapter) as part of the Noise in My Head: Voices from the Ugly Australian Underground book!
Stream Dogging right here and pick up a copy from Easter Bilby (US) right here while you still have a chance.
Check out a live clip of Low Life at Maggotfest V last month right here, along with a full show from July 4th 2014:
