MUSIC

Rudyard's presents The Hangouts * Only Beast * Black Cock * Busy Kids.

The Hangouts- (College Station, TX ) “The Hangouts are a fiercely fun geekbeat teenage puberty rush punk rock band, borne from their influences as teenage skateboard punks reading Maximumrockandroll and Thrasher, dialing up Voivod and The Ramones on their boomboxes and dreaming of relieving the immense boredom of a Reagan-era youth. Throw that youthful experience into the real life experience of having lived in this world for 30-someodd years, being married, raising children, dealing with work bullshit, the endless misunderstanding of being upstanding citizens encased in the bodies of tattoed heathens, and you’ve got for the makings of punk rock with heart. And that’s what the Hangouts make. Punk rock with heart. No trendy ska-punk, emo-punk, ironic detachment…this is the real deal.” - Kelly Minnis – 979represent.com

Only Beast – (Houston, TX ) Peter Bernick (Guitar/Music) – Danielle (Vocals) – Johnny Fever (Drums) 

Black Cock – (Austin, TX ) Black Cock, Robot Child With A God Complex: One of the cruelest things about Black Cock’s relentlessly brutal debut is that it’s actually really good, forcing us to spend the year saying, “We really like Black Cock… No, really.” Hilarious, dudes (and lady-dude). (Perhaps next year some talented motherfuckers can start a band called Eating My Own Poo, or Touching Children Inappropriately.) Like its up-yours moniker, the sci-fi conceit of that title is no accident either: A post-apocalyptic unease pervades the disc, as the twisted-steel slam of the guitar and drums—those last remaining soldiers of mankind’s resistance, nihilists who spend their days blasting Jesus Lizard’s Goat in their tanks to pump themselves up—are dive-bombed by the buzzard-like screech of a battalion’s worth of synths, sparking an album-long back-and-forth tumult between man and machine that was way more entertaining than Terminator: Salvation. Even the ostensible human vocals are vulnerable, stretched and pitched into an otherworldly, bewitching, permanently sneering Greek chorus that seems to find all this death and destruction endlessly amusing. (Or maybe they’re still laughing about that name.) – Austin AV Club

Busy Kids (Sorry, No Info On Line)