Frustrations

Frustrations’ first album, 2007’s Glowing Red Pill, was auspicious and audacious enough: The guitar-bashing platter opens with a fuzz-blasted instrumental dubbed “Freebird II,” following it with nine more tracks of noisy gut-level post-punk that nodded to loud, weird punk contemporaries and ’90s noise rock forebears.

While the band’s debut was a strong one, the four years the Detroit scuzz-lovers spent between records served them well. Last year’s Negative Reflections offers an exciting new direction: Caught between TV Ghost’s paranoid-Cramps post-punk and Tyvek’s blunt-force garage scrawl, Negative Reflections showcases a darker and more, well, frustrated Frustrations.

It’s not an about-face by any means. If anything, it’s a reaffirmation of Frustrations’ Midwest punk lineage. Its opening riff closely echoes the Midwest-punk anthem “Sonic Reducer,” a song attributed to two iconic Cleveland bands: Rocket From The Tombs and the Dead Boys. Even as the album veers into more angular and irritable territory, it’s a link to the region’s consistent crop of garage-rock weirdos. Songs like “Exhaust” and “Surgeon” dive headlong into psych-damaged freak-outs that fit nicely next to Timmy Vulgar’s B-movie psych-outs in Human Eye and Timmy’s Organism. The haunted lurch of “These Woods” feels like a Tyvek-worthy assault, but its locked-in rhythm section isn’t far from The Dirtbombs’ stubborn grooves. “Black Lightning” is a melted-brain slur akin to Indiana’s TV Ghost. An exception, “Confusion Kills” might nod to New York’s Sonic Youth with its title, but it still comes shaded by MC5 proto-punk.

But the songs are what matter, not the references. And Frustrations don’t let their influences get in the way of manic hooks that hit and stick. The band might be a product of its surroundings, but their songs suggest they could be influential well beyond them.—Bryan C. Reed