Following their 2017 sophomore album
Subordination
, half of the members of ragged punk band
Institute
left Austin for New York. Looking firsthand at wealth disparity and corporate greed in his new big-city environment, bandleader
Moses Brown
began writing songs even more politically charged and anxious than the already furious
. When they last checked in,
had stretched out their raw punk style into more experimental zones, injecting some songs with elements of trashy glam rock and nervous post-punk. Third album
Readjusting the Locks
strips back those experimental impulses and offers a lean slab of writhing, filthy-sounding rock & roll, leaning heavily on the demented swagger of '70s proto-punk acts. The band's caustically lo-fi production bent is still in full force, with guitar tones pushing the boundaries of fuzz, and drums sounding processed through a wall of broken boom boxes. While this has been their approach for almost every record,
feels more on the edge of combustion than ever. Still sounding like a worn cassette copy of the
Warsaw
demos, the band channels
Raw Power
-era
Stooges
and untethered '70s punk acts like the
Adverts
and the
Vibrators
on swaggering tracks like "Mon Cherie."
Brown
rails against banks, neo-liberal agendas, and modern updates to fascist models, striking out for blood on standout tracks like "Dazzle Paint." On "Roll Music," he assesses the pointlessness of playing music when the future looks so bleak, but he also addresses the paradox of how necessary it is to staying sane.
is
's most urgent material, and also their strongest to date. With a sharper edge than other releases, every song comes out swinging, with the combination of high-power playing and unrelenting dread making for the perfect soundtrack to an existential crisis. ~ Fred Thomas