At night we hear tanks rumbling across the village, towards the Western Front where what’s left of our army still resists. During the day, occupation patrols roam the streets smoking cigarettes, chatting in their harsh language and ogling the women.

They took the headmaster away but we still go to school, the lessons unfold in silence as we stare from the window, new rebel graffiti in the walls every morning, later covered by propaganda posters which will be torn down during the night. The humiliation of defeat and invasion has left way to steely resolve, a cold focus in the eyes of father and my brothers quietly smoking in front of the hearth, of mother as she methodically skins a rabbit before dinner.

It is in the darkness when shadowy figures dance their dance of avoiding the white lights that spill voracious from the eagle nests where grim snipers enforce the curfew, it is then when the postman and the baker drop bulky parcels through the back door, soon to be hidden in the cellar, also when father slides an antique gun in the pocket of his jacket and disappears into the night.

We stay in bed with our eyes open, trying to decipher the cryptic echoes of the cloak and dagger shenanigans unfolding outside – distant detonations, the gasp of one who’s throat has just been slit, military apparel clattering and leather creaking, a supply train that derails in the wood  under the surprised gaze of beautiful deer, all lock into the cruel rhythm of a partisan jukebox which is the lullaby to which we eventually sleep.

Teenage Panzerkorps’ German Reggae is the cacophony of a post-punk military industrial complex held together with saliva and sweat –ultimate weapon for aural blitzkrieg vomited by a factory line that pulses with what’s left of krautrock’s idealistic metronome after a bath in realpolitik’s acid, bastard child of the greasy hands of an unskilled workforce whipped into productive frenzy by the furious aspersions of Mark E. Smith’s Prussian doppelganger.

Teenage Panzerkorps-Brief Terror

You can get it digital from here.

French skronky blues alpha motherfucking commando Cheveu, whose balaclavaed mugshots must by now be at the top of Interpol’s most sought after genre rapists, have come up with another bewildering masterpiece in 1000, perhaps the successful reflection of Liars’ pop attempts in their self-titled album of a couple of years back.

Exhibit A: No Birds, an impossible traincrash of 80s so-young-yet-so-cold nouvelle vague insectoid beats and jaunty string stabs stolen from some muso pop opera, then mangled into a paranoid minicoda which sounds like Einsturzende Neubauten applying themselves to the propulsive finale of Kiss Me Again with rusty dentist utensils.

Cheveu- No Birds

Get it from Born Bad in Europe, Kill Shaman in the USA.