Recommended Album: Powerwasher – ‘Everyone Laughs’

A name like Powerwasher is one of a band who should be leaving a lasting mark on the listener. Maybe that target wasn’t hit in the initial foundation of anxious post-punk with a corrosive post-hardcore exterior heard throughout the Baltimore four-piece’s first extended play in 2020’s The Power of Positive Washing, but four years later, it’s a different conversation. Their debut album, Everyone Laughs, reminds you that not every band needs to have their sound figured out right out of the gate, as they’ve now assumed their own identity through multitudes (even if the band members themselves intentionally keep their own names out of it,) ensuring the surge of growth is like experiencing a blast to your skull. The corners of underground rock which Powerwasher now move through are varied in edge. Post-punk looms omnipresent, acerbically so at that, with more hooks loaded into its jabs on tracks like “Crossing the Street”, “Same Time / Same Channel” and “TM 31-210”, but so does an element of unpredictability feeding off the vocalist’s teetering mental pace. Early standout “1-900-POWERWASHER” explodes social neuroticism into a fist fight between hardcore and noise-jazz, but then hears everyone being pushed out of the room with “Stoned” as it ruminates regrets in post-hardcore and pedal steel à la Wednesday and MJ Lenderman band member Xandy Chelmis for those with a lot of time to overthink on their hands. There’s a dotted line between Shellac, Life Without Buildings, and Militarie Gun being designed somewhere in it all. In essence, they’re all part of the same method of observation in turning the everyday existential into their own provocation of a noisy mind made fun. Powerwasher just may be laughing harder than the rest…

Highlights: “1-900-Powerwasher”, “Same Time / Same Channel”, “Stoned”

Powerwasher’s Everyone Laughs is available now on Strange View Records.

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