Music: Wiggly Air by Kurt Gottschalk

Power chord lunch. The sainted and venerated Joe Strummer warned us. We’d grow up and we’d calm down, he foretold. We’d start wearing blue and brown. Sorry to say, we’ve not yet aged out of the days of evil presidentes he sang about on “Clampdown” (recorded with the Clash for London Calling, one of the highest watermarks of punk) back in 1979, before words like “monetize” and “influencer” were parts of anyone’s vocabulary. Now punk is lip-synced on Tik Tok and making money is celebrated in most stripes of the popular song.

For Tempe, Arizona’s Bright Sunshine, however, selling out to corporate powers isn’t an option. They set out to be the corporate powers, starting with their first single, 2022’s “Team Building Potluck.” Their debut album, Southwest Executive Leadership Team (also 2022) had all the anger and adrenaline of good ol’ rock’n’roll revolution. Imagine if Mike in Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized” got his act together and climbed the ladder but he’s not an iota happier. Now we’re getting somewhere. Rants screamed over repeated riffs, but it’s a staff meeting. The power-suit trio rages atop the machine. Executive Power Supreme (LP and download out from Reptilian Records last month) is their sophomore album, or maybe their FY2025 annual report. It rips through half an hour, no time wasted, no feelings spared. A lot of you aren’t pulling your weight. Bright Sunshine is here to set straight them straight while rewarding those few model workers with cocaine and Olive Garden gift certificates. This is an album you need to hear, but even more so your uncle you don’t like talking to. Joe Strummer may have sounded the alarm but DEVO were the first responders, embracing corporatization and homogeneity. But DEVO did it with cheeky dystopian vibes. Bright Sunshine means business.

How to succeed in bitchiness without really trying. Meanwhile, over in Wales, the self-titled debut by the untamed and untempered Panic Shack opens with a very different statement of organizational strategy. “Girl Band Starter Pack” sets an agenda for getting hyped for a girls’ night out: doing shots, shooting pool and dancing, getting loud and getting freaky. They just wanna have fun, you know. They namecheck Thelma and Louise in the closing track, an anthem to outlaw friendship, but most of the album is closer to Mean Girls attitude, addressing ambition, procrastination and self-medication, body issues and bad housekeeping, usually in the first person and with heavy sarcasm; boys are only occasionally on the agenda. The punky party girls been at it since 2018 and have dropped a couple of singles and an EP but here make it clear they can carry the attitude through at least a short set. The 34-minute flurry (CD, LP, download out last month from Brace Yourself Records) is a quick round of pop-punk declarations of self, with nonstop hooks and hilarity. See if you can kick back a couple of seaweed-infused rums (apparently that’s a thing in Wales) and throw a dart at the lyric sheet without hitting something brilliantly quotable.

Pure pop for then people. Brian Baker seems to be a man about Columbus, Ohio. His Bandcamp bio lists a dozen bands, including the nearly cleverly named Brian Damage. “Nearly clever” describes much of All Hell Broke Loose (cassette and download via Anyway Records August 8), his fourth full-length, likably unessential, under that moniker. Only two of the album’s dozen tracks break the three-minute mark, but each is its own little trifle—in the sense of a novelty but also a dessert. Baker might be something like the sponge cake at the base of the after-dinner trifle, soaking up the brandy of ‘80s and ‘90s indie pop and topping it with his own fruit preserves and cream. OK, that was a bit forced, but it fits. The album is dripping with retro but manages to keep its particular joie de vivre aloft quite well, occasionally sounding something like an old Cheap Trick LP played at 39 rpm. What makes his Weezer-aspirations stand out as his own inventions is the occasional haywire synthesizers and his against-type impulses. He’s at his best when he indulges his home studio fancies: the bird songs on the 71-second opener, “Earth’s Main Character,” or on the two-minute title track, a mélange of music box, drum machine, guttural chorus and layered vocal harmonies. The fact that Baker writes catchy, familiar songs wouldn’t necessarily be enough, but the quirks on All Hell Broke Loose seal the deal.

Louder than a bomb. Certain sonic booms just can’t be imagined: the cathedral-filling swell of the pipe organ in a 16th century farming village; the pounding of the first pianofortes, making boomboxes out of harpsichords; the revelry of the military brass band. Years later, Chuck Berry and the Beatles blaring out of transistor radios must have been a glorious assault on public ears. In the summer of 1989, another new kind of noise was heard by the public at large, as Rosie Perez fiercely danced and shadowboxed her way through the opening credits of Spike Lee’s box office smash Do the Right Thing in front of a city street stage set. “Fight the Power” wasn’t Public Enemy’s first single—“Public Enemy No. 1” (another statement of purpose) came out two years earlier—and it certainly wasn’t the first rap record, but Lee’s movie brought the noise to a mass audience, an unseemly, almost impossible, ruckus of production.

A lot of water’s gone under the bridge in the ensuing 26 years. There’s been a dozen or so more albums plus solo albums, side projects and a spin-off group, a memoir and a reality show, infighting and charges of anti-Semitism. New music from the PE camp has tended to be more exciting than memorable. But when “Fight the Power” hit, the militant message of anti-racism was something we needed, and make no mistake, we still do. Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025 (digital out in June, LP and CD Oct. 10 via MVD) hits with that punch again. It also takes on something far more uncommon in the realms of hip hop, and does it so bluntly that there’s even a track called “Ageism,” in which, as ever, Chuck D intones his authoritative poetry: “Rhyme gymnastics Nasty I’m 6-4 / Not in height it’s the age and stage I fight / Father Time ain’t never lost / Voice a earthquake / Don’t forget Mother Nature still a boss / See the Black Planet they fear.” Elsewhere, he repeats “Sexagenarian Vape / I digs into them old school crates / Thumbing through them OG greats / Away from the Age of sour grapes of hate.” They’re still (or back to) speaking truth and speaking it hard.

Is there another “Fight the Power,” or “Can’t Do Nuttin’ for Ya Man” for that matter, on the new album? Time will tell. But “What Eye Said” and “Messy Hens” are close contenders, and the many lyrical callbacks in “Public Enemy Comin Throoooo” declare both that they’ve been around and they’re still around. Terminator X and the Bomb Squad were the architects of the landmark Fear of a Black Planet (the album that closed with “Fight the Power”). They’re not part of the crew anymore, and there’s no celebrity guest verses here either. It’s all Chuck D and Flavor Flav and sampled dialogue, driving beats and hard rock guitar clips. The dynamic duo is credited as executive producers alongside their management team (Lorrie “The LBX” Boula and Rhiannon Rae Ellis). There was likely other help enlisted—complete credits aren’t out yet—but it’s their show and it’s the best they’ve sounded in a long time. Yeah, boyeee.