Skip to content
Debut LP from the Indiana ragers, featuring members of Liquids, CCTV, Big Zit, Ooze, Pentas, Scabs, Pukeoid.
MINE EARS HAVE HEARD THE GLORY OF THE COMING OF THE FRITZ. And let’s face it, with members of Liquids and CCTV on board, you know exactly what you’re getting – and that ‘glory’ is the right word here.
Less Devo-lved than some of their other projects, The Fritz nonetheless deliver the goods you’ll wanna hear: lo-fi ragers, garage schlock, hi-speed songs that barely break the minute mark before they collapse under the weight of the spittle that’s gathered in the corners of their frothing mouths. This is the manic energy of dudes that are too smart or too dumb or both, and it’ll make you wanna head to Indiana immediately so you can scream at ‘em to play and play and play until you or they can take no more.
The Damned dancing on a circular saw? Booji Boys writing hoax hostage notes to their own parents? The contents of your own rotten soul, drunk and pissed-off and hilarious and brilliant at 45rpm? The Fritz may remind you of all these things. Mostly, they are likely to remind you of why you fell in love with railing against the world in the first place, and they’ll shred your speakers while they do so. Now let’s go spraypaint their name on the town hall before the cops come.
Will Fitzpatrick.
Our take: Debut 12” from this Chicago-area band that boasts members of both CCTV and Liquids as well as a bunch of more hardcore-ish bands. The Liquids connection particularly makes sense because the Fritz have a similar way of bouncing back and forth between hardcore and more song-oriented styles, though the Fritz don’t ever get straight up poppy in the way that Liquids sometimes does. There’s also a distinct rock n roll element to the riffing, which brings to mind a number of different 90s garage-punk bands like the Rip Offs, Teengenerate, or even New Bomb Turks. Like all three of those bands, the Fritz straight up rip in the manner of a hardcore band, but at the same time they seem to be reaching backward to an earlier, even more primal era of rock and roll. And of course the production is piss raw in all of the right ways. I don’t know if the Fritz is going to blow up like Coneheads or Liquids because they don’t put the melodies right at the forefront like those bands do, but if you like your punk raw, ripping, and riffy listening to this record will be just as lovely as having your back scratched in exactly the right spot.