LAST DAYS ON EARTH (PURPLE VINYL)

German post-punk band Onyon scrambled our brains when we heard them, so much so that we signed them & reissued their debut cassette EP in June of '22. "Last Days On Earth" is the band's latest for Trouble In Mind. The oddball, synth-soaked world of Onyon is disorienting at first - the band's herky-jerky rhythms may operate in a familiar fashion to bands like Devo, or LITHICS, but Maria Untheim's woozy synth squiggles populate & punctuate the band's songs, flirting with the primitive cool of 80's minimal-synth and the wire-haired cretinism of 60s garage. Guitarist Ilka Kellner rages unpretentiously with edges torn & frayed, never afraid to unleash a spindly lead line over Florian Schmidt's rubbery bass lines & Mario Pongratz's stuttering drum patterns. Kellner & Untheim share vocal duties, but the real magic comes when the two sing together, voices merging in loosely harmonic gang vocals; one deadpan, the other slightly unhinged. The group's beguiling lyrics add to the mystique - inscrutable neu-world fables about egg machines, ghosts, worms that talk and urges to consume newspaper that ooze a rural, old-world understanding of life & the imperceptible spaces in between reality & fiction, transmuted thru a modernist sci-fi lens flare.