VARIOUS ARTISTS

Kicking off the year in grim fashion, Sacred Bones continue their mission to be one of the world’s coolest labels. Not only are they they continuing to release records by bands at the forefront of the new avant-garde, but they’re also re-releasing painfully underrated gems from the annals of alternative music. Killed By Deathrock is a nod to the punk collectors series Killed By Death and features 11 cuts of jarring, creepy rock and roll and post-punk as selected by Sacred Bones head honcho Caleb Braaten.

Essentially, Braaten has dusted off some forgotten treasures and put them on the mantel for everyone to enjoy. American punks Glorious Din’s Tenement Roofs is a new wave masterpiece, completely saturated by haunted reverberation while tracks like Baroque Bordello’s Put It Down are more standard, downtuned punk affairs playing heavily on the minor key ghoul sound. There’s a likelihood that unless you’ve got a major chubby for death rock this will be your first flirtation with the tracks assembled here, so if you’re looking to dig a bit deeper than the bourgeois cannon of post-punk then Killed By Deathrock isn’t far off the best place to start.

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Words: Billy Black