bands like OUCH MY FACE are why i'll never be happy with how i've organized my music folder. a 3-piece outfit from melbourne lead by vocalist celeste potter, OMF call into question our notions of what can be considered "punk". this highly experimental album smashes genre lines and delivers a diverse set of tracks ranging from conventional punk chaos, like that in "eye", to the contemporary electronic pop sounds found in the very next track "creep heart", with a good heap of post-rock fuzz like that of "how to gut a fish". that's a lot of sounds balanced at once, but they all have an undeniably punk attitude. the lyrics are crude and shouted repetitively, leaving a fist-sized hole in your head from where the choruses were drilled in. the drums are punchy and unrelenting and the bass magnificently tight and sharp, described elsewhere as "still buzzsaws ready to tear you limb from limb"*. what i can't get over is how refined everything is. raw emotions have been polished to a mirror shine and the instrumentation is cold, calculated disorder. everything seems deliberately placed to maximize feelings of resentment towards parental figures and society at large. that's pretty punk.
