- Courtesy the Raydios’ Facebook page
- The Raydios in late 2014. That’s Fink in the sunglasses.
Twenty years ago I arrived at the conviction that the best punk band in the world came from Japan: Teengenerate broke up in 1996, just three years after their first seven-inch, but the one proper LP they released during that span, 1994’s Get Action!, still hasn’t been topped. I’m not referring to “punk” in the “bondage pants and great big pointy haircuts” sense, but rather to an in-the-red descendent of undomesticated 60s garage rock, rooted in the blues and fueled by the reckless energy of juvenile delinquents in hopped-up cars.
The A side, which you can stream below, emphasizes melody over pell-mell drive, though it’s got plenty of both. I miss the bubbly, mobile bass lines that buoyed Teengenerate’s feral roar, but otherwise, no complaints. The B side is a touch slower but hardly relaxed, with a few new-wavey single-string licks and lots of syncopated punches.
