Yesterday I was at a gig from The Outcasts and it was a damn cool evening. Superb action and I want to post a record from them but I have nothing, haha....what a disgrace! Well, instead this great one: The Estranged are a post-punk band from Portland, Oregon. They started out in 2006. They play dark and foreboding guitar driven music with a relentless sense of urgency in a similar vein to The Wipers, Wire, Joy Division and The Cure. With their 1st album Static Thoughts, The Estranged attempt to combine the volatile combination of post-punk and punk with positive results on the whole. The album could have been a disaster on the scale of the Hindenburg, but instead is a balanced combination of contemporary post-punk songs that rely on traditional punk rock’s finer cornerstones - two to three minute numbers that are fast, simple, catchy, and - in this case - bleak. Indeed, Static Thoughts is more than a throwback to a deceased genre; The Estranged cultivate their bleak post-punk sound with a heavy lean on punk rock giving the often angsty music a much needed rainy day. Crossing musical genre’s is a risky but this album is clever, quick and done with so much gusto so that the crossover is not even felt. (Justin) Great record!
