If Big Bill were from Bristol, Brighton, or London, NME would’ve long ago run articles effusively praising their peculiar strain of punk and proclaiming them the next-big-thing. That is to say, the Austin quartet, est. 2011, was ahead of the curve on the more recent UK sensation of quirky punk with dissonant guitar and interesting talk-singing vocalists sharing cross-eyed ruminations about life. Of course, Big Bill’s palpably weirder than much of that scene.: On Public Freakout Compilation, the group’s first album since 2017 and best overall work, BB still inhabits that mode here and there – notably the pummeling avian metaphor “Hawk” – but hits their highest peaks with diversified sounds. The unusually patient “Picture” resembles an apocalyptic Velvet Underground, while “Almost Everybody” is an alt-y nugget of post-grunge power-pop that would’ve contended as a single on Weezer’s Blue Album.: The band, whose gleefully abnormal sound early on approximated SpongeBob singing for the Dead Milkmen and who have since honed their stage-diving act so pointedly that civilian clothes won’t do (their stage getups could be criminal wardrobe from the Sixties Batman show), now freak out with the stacked two-stage Bill Ball. All ballin’: left-brain psych goofballs Being Dead, Masani Camacho-fronted punk trio Pussy Gillette, American dream dissector Chucky BLK, garage-y post-punk patriarchy-squishers Sailor Poon, introspective lyricist Khxnid!, and art-pop cranium-crackers Calliope Musicals.
Sat., Aug. 20