Cold Cream: Cold Cream II | ★★★½ | Self-released  |  Feb. 2

From the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to Minor Threat’s “Straight Edge,” there is something expressly punk about the form of the very short song—its polemical efficiency, its complete disregard for radio and commerce, its restive energy to get on to the next thing.

Few have taken the idea further than the Brakes, a UK band whose 2005 album Give Blood featured 16 songs in less than 30 minutes, the shortest clocking in at seven seconds. (Its lyrics entirely: “Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, stop being such a dick!”)

But the Triangle’s Cold Cream gives the Brakes a close run on their second album, a barrel of laughs bursting into flames for no reason as it rolls toward a ravine. 

The band is full of familiar faces in slightly mixed-up places: It includes Ron Liberti, the singer of the long-running indie band Pipe, though in this band configuration, malleable belter Mara Thomas is the singer, and Liberti plays the growling garage-punk guitar. It also includes Laura King, a seasoned drummer who is now in Superchunk, but local-music omnipresence Clark Blomquist plays the drums (and synths), while King plays bass instead. 

Together, the group takes evident inspiration from bands like the Ramones, The Clash, and X and hot-rods it down to the chassis, pinstriping the frames with funny, seriously nonsensical lyrics and polishing them with potent melodic hooks.

There are shout-along theme songs with one-note guitar solos (“Cactus Wife”), minor-key sidewinders in the paranoid post-punk vein (“FastFashTreasureIsland”), and scissor-kicking moshers (“SeeSaw”). Especially striking is “Penelope,” where a ropy bass line and ocean waves of feedback conjure shades of the experimental side of Jawbreaker. 

Cold Cream II is even more concise than the first number in their self-deprecatingly grandiose titling scheme, winking at Led Zeppelin. The average song length of 80 or 90 seconds has a strange time-lensing effect by which “Fixedair,” at almost three and a half minutes, becomes an epic odyssey to the bends of time and space, especially with the powerful arcs that Thomas’s vocal cuts through vibrating sludge-rock mix. 

This is a fun and furious record, like a supercut of the explosions from a movie about a band playing for its life in a world where “all killer, no filler” has been imposed as martial law. 

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