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The Carp: Knock Your Block Off 12” (Total Punk Records) When I first heard about Cleveland’s the Carp, they were pitched to me as an oi! / street punk band from the Cruelster camp, a proposition that immediately intrigued me. As a big fan of the Cruelster universe, I wondered how on earth those two things might go together, and that they don’t really, but exist in an unstable tension across Knock Your Block Off’s ten tracks, makes it one of the most interesting records to emerge from this crew of musicians and one of my favorite punk records of 2024. For anyone with only a passing familiarity with this group of interconnected bands—the aforementioned Cruelster, Knowso, Perverts Again, Smooth Brain, and probably more I’m forgetting / don’t know about—this will probably just sound like another one of those bands with their knotty rhythms, deadpan vocals, and obtuse lyrics. Knowso vocalist and lyricist Nathan Ward is at the helm and sounds very much like himself here, and even though he’s on guitar rather than his usual bass, it turns out his guitar lines sound a lot like his bass lines, angular but hooky, not as exaggeratedly stiff as Knowso, but still coming with a big dollop of homegrown, Devo-esque robotic rhythm. If you’re not interested in what Nathan and his crew does, you can probably stop reading here, but those of us who are in for a pound on this lot are treated to an entirely new musical landscape, albeit one viewed through Ward’s distinctively cracked perspective. As I mentioned, I wondered how the whole oi! / street punk thing would manifest itself in the Carp’s music, and it turns out that it does so in fascinatingly idiosyncratic ways. It’s certainly not a parody or homage; there’s nothing so obvious as a gang chorus, and the exclamation “oi!” appears nowhere on the record as far as I can remember, but those (the few?) of us with a deep appreciation for street punk aesthetics and Nathan Ward’s artistry will love following the faint through-line. There’s work and labor as a lyrical theme (which, admittedly, flows through much of Nathan’s work, including the latest Knowso album we released on Sorry State), the nightmarish skinhead costumes in the video for “Toxic Peace” (which you should most definitely check out on YouTube), and a cover of “Cut Ups” by A Global Threat, a band close to the heart of many a 30-something former street punk. There’s also the odd Blitz-esque guitar hook or (potentially) anthemic chorus (see: “Servitude! You feed on it like breast milk”), but mostly these references are so thoroughly annihilated by Nathan Ward’s mental meat grinder that they’re barely recognizable. A standout track is “Fairview Park Skins,” whose title makes it seem like it’ll be some sort of suburban Dropkick Murphys homage, but when you actually pay attention to the lyrics, it’s not really about skinheads, but a shirts versus skins basketball game in which, appropriately, the skins annihilate the shirts. (Side note: I also love how this song slyly appropriates Rancid’s habit of littering their songs with the names of streets and bus routes.) It’s difficult for me to imagine how any of this will play to a newcomer to this group of bands… it’s so throughly drenched in their peculiar aesthetic, and I get so much pleasure from peeling the onion’s layers that I feel like I can’t access what this might look like from the outside. But for those of us neck deep in this world and loving it, Knock Your Block Off is as great as anything else we’ve heard from this crew, one of the most original and interesting voices in contemporary punk.