Dai Disco on joyride!’s Half Moon Bay LP

Like a chance encounter with a lost friend, San Francisco Punks joyride! are back to keep our hearts from stopping with a pulsating ride that burns through the cold winter nights.

From opening track “how it feels”, that stabs with the sharpened edge of a love with no map, to the aching “running on empty”, through to the slow burning coat of arms “how to tell” that creeps up on you like time and has you heading back through the stream like Booster Gold visiting the ghost of Blue Beetle for the last time; every song leaves something on you and bruises like a fifty-fifty with Trevor Hockey wearing Gilberts.

As with the epic bodies of water before it, half moon bay bound me with its words and sentiments before taking a mutinous joyride through my mind; down the winding dark roads, past the upside-down burnt out wrecks and losses, and on to the ones not taken and not yet reached. This is the kind of punk that rattles the hard to reach heartstrings like falling on a Brautigan line after crawling arse-first through a pile of over-intellectual shit that spews un-relatable language which holds hands with the degree you’re doing to stay off the dole for a bit. And like Brautigan handing out his poetry on older versions of the same San Francisco streets, joyride!’s words too hold no pretensions. Instead they bite with a bare and pure expression and hit with uncompromising beauty. This is the kind of Punk with no presence in the world of social media except for a bandcamp page that reads “punk, San Francisco”. This is the kind of Punk that catches you off guard, haunts like a lost love and energises like a new one. This is the kind of Punk that makes everything else sound shit.

Perhaps this is too poetic though. Maybe it would be best just to say: joyride! have a new album out and it’s fucking brilliant.

Give them what you can spare of your dole money here, or get your hands on a lovely cassette vis Stupid Bag Records here, or in rare the case that you are off the sauce for a week the vinyl version via Salina Records here.