Blood on the Wall: Liferz

Label: The Social Registry

Awesomer, Blood on the Wall’s second album, was a terrific, noisy, howling punk rock record. Liferz, their follow-up, is all of those things but boasts a more cohesive feel throughout: Brad Shanks supplies perfectly timed blasts of feedback, and reports that he seems to have found his inner Mark Arm are, I’d say, accurate. Courtney Shanks’s vocals here lend a yearning, restrained counterpoint to the proceedings, and the space created between the two enlarges the scope of the album considerably. (Witness the one-two punch of “Junkeee…Julieee…” and “Go Go Go”.) There’s something deeply focused about this album, a charging block of energy and fuzzed-out vitality that’s hard to resist. (Tobias)