CEL RAY 'Piss Park' 7"

Six Tonnes De Chair Records – STDC069

Chicago post-punks Cel Ray have returned with another fast, frenetic, funny freak show in the form of 4 new songs on a beautiful slab of wax.
Across this EP, vocalist Maddie Daviss warps day-to-day anxieties, ranging from finding the ideal location to publicly urinate to the struggle of attaching names to faces, into frenetically charged anthems, reminiscent of those of Poly Styrene and Su Tissue before her. Josh Rodin’s guitars jangle aggressively atop the punchy and urgent grooving of bassist Kevin Goggin and drummer/recording engineer Alex Watson, creating an angular framework as sincerely sardonic as the vocals that ride atop it.
Raw enough for the hardcore and refined enough for the hip, Piss Park fucks on its own terms.

"These Chicago punks who share a name with a gross New York deli soda have teamed up with French label Six Tonnes De Chair for their second release. CEL RAY is clearly a band who’ve clomped around in the yolk that oozed out of NWI a decade or so back, but they’ve managed not to track too much goo onto the four tracks that make up this EP. By forgoing the brash cartoonishness of a lot of their contemporaries and balancing their DEVO stiffness with some loose, jazzier sounds closer to the MINUTEMEN, they avoid sounding like the straight CONEHEADS-core that is all too ubiquitous these days. It’s upbeat, energetic punk that reminds me bit of what I love about the pre-hardcore punk that came out of Southern California, anchored by a strong vocal performance—Maddie Daviss delivers her lyrics about the mundanities of Midwestern living in a cool, deadpan talk-shout that every so often breaks into a full-throated song—with just the right amount of C.C.T.V.-esque jitteriness to give it more of a contemporary post-punk-y edge. Absolutely worth checking out!" - Alex Howell, MRR #490 • March 2024