A Case for Hatching: My Eulogy for Egg Punk Explained by Martin Meyer

Sukebe_GG

Uranium Club might be a great (the best?) example of good songwriting breaking a band out of genre prison. They have all the sonic ingredients of the average egg punk shit sandwich, but they do so much structurally, so much with production, so much with the dynamics and ranges and voices of a four-piece punk band, that they didn't even come to my mind since this thread started.

Uranium Club = objectively cool and good.

11th hour stubble Does anyone have an opinion on the Pink Noise? I thought they were exciting, there was a real well done interview back in the day where RK got Mark to talk through every song on an album. Are they only a footnote cause they were from north of the border? or some kind of Sacred Bones stink? I put out a latter day LP that was far from shitgaze to very little fanfare, but i thought it was fantastic, still have like 20 copies.

I viewed Pink Noise more in the weird punk camp and I really liked Dream Code when it came out. By the time of the second album the weird punk bloat was really setting in and I was tired of the whole thing. I think that had more to do with it than them being Canadian. Gonna go back and visit a bunch of the weird punk heavy hitters again this week.

Nathan Loud I remember really loving the first Uranium Club album when it came out, liking the second, and by the third album thinking I've had enough. About a year ago go I went back and did a deep dive and realized that my original opinion had more to do with my general exhaustion of everything feeling so tight and anxious than their actual output. Their songs have a real lyrical intelligence and sense of humor and the songwriting is incredible.

Sukebe_GG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_punk

Also the revision/discussion history for this wiki page is pretty funny. The Australians were added and removed over time, and there’s some legal wrangling over whether egg punk can be described as a microgenre at all.

Within the last few days, someone in Portland made an edit. Pretty sure I know who did it!

Also, mysteriously no mention of the European egg costume guy, who I thought was like the Chuck Berry of egg punk??? Injustice!

Randall
They've built their own world through their (for lack of a better term) schtick and I can still appreciate it a few LPs in. Obsessive levels of Serious-Not-Serious assembly. Hard to imagine them being applicable to this article, unless Egg just means being a tight band.

Mitch C. yeah I didn’t really remember when the term was coined but apparently it was 2017 and Lumpy, Uranium Club, and quite a few other bands that I don’t really equate with the term were included. Most if not all bands I consider Egg Punk were not even around for another 2-3 years

Randall
I guess I get it if "Fast Devo" is the main criteria. I guess what I'm saying is that Uranium Club doesn't sound or present as lazy to me at all.

I think people started conflating egg punk with both weird punk and devo core at some point, where I would typically think of egg punk as the intersection of those micro-genres. The meme that named the genre presented all these bands on a chain/egg spectrum, with the Dumpers at like 3/4 the way to full egg. So, by that logic even, like, Warthog was a little egg punk. Anyway, I think that spectrum both highlights the point that egg punk cuts across weird punk, but it also served to muddy the waters in making the distinction, which is probably why folks are too loose with the term these days.

In any event, I feel like “lazy” is the wrong word here. Because it’s not like some kid churning out the most derivative of egg punk is failing to work hard—they’re just failing to be original.

is there a weird punk explainer? that one passed me by

Mitch C. ok well have you listened to their latest record cuzz.....

kai To me « weird punk » is the Termbo name, ie « the OG name », while « shitgaze » is the name Spin or whatever-shitty-magazine came up with afterwards for all these bands from the mid to late 00s that have been mentioned here : Tyvek, Pink Reason, Home Blitz, Psychedelic Horseshit, Times New Viking, Eat Skull, etc. I think there was even a « the year weird punk broke » article in Termbo, maybe in like 2007? Or was it 2008? It was called like that because this wave of bands was a nice change from the orthodoxy of garage bands from the previous decade or so, including the 90s. Which can be explained at least partly by the massive democratization of file-sharing, hence of obscure/ « new » influences for bands, as it was the glory days of Mediafire, MegaUpload, etc. Anyway, that’s how I remember things, but I guess someone else might disagree.

ratcharge Ah those days of endless blog posts and mediafire! Here's the "Weird Punk" disc of a 12-disc comp that was posted on some blog or another back then. Obviously a mixed bag that no single genre term could really encapsulate...Mayyors, who rule, but no Puffy Areolas?!

Sukebe_GG Puffy Areolas

Fuck yeah that first album is a masterpiece.

ratcharge Puffy Areolas record is incredible. Top track is "get me out of houston".

Sukebe_GG Dear all, I stand corrected. Weird Punk is Egg Punk of yore in sense of the number of bands and varying quality.

Shitgaze similarity was just how invented by lifers (pink reason and wolf eyes) as a joke people thought was funny and inside baseball for a second, then started to react negative.