This is the Zig Zags.
They are a ripping garage speed punk band that sounds like Motorhead and Black Sabbath had sex with Zeke (awesome speed punk band) and the nwobhm (new wave of british heavy metal – that is now the old wave that happened in the 70’s and 80’s).
Check out ‘My Lighter’ and you’ll have a good idea of how Zigs Zags can rock.
It’s too bad they haven’t done a video for that song, since it’s one of our favorites at the Modern Fix compound. For months now, when someone needs their lighter back, “Gimme back my lighter!” sung in the vein of Zig Zags is the rally cry for returned Zippos.
All one needs to know about Zig Zags is they more than qualify as a band that ‘rocks’. Theirs is a bit retro, a lot noisey, and served up with a loose punk approach. When they slow the tempos down, it becomes rather spacey and post-psychedlic.
Witness: ‘Voices of the Paranoid’
We did stumble on this gem called, ‘Killer of Killers’. A very metalized Zig Zag number that comes with a crazy horror low budget video.
When Zig Zags get really fuzzed out and cranking, they start to tread in waters inhabited by bands like High on Fire and Mastodon. Like this track, ‘Braindead Warrior’.
For a really good insight into the mentality that is the Zig Zags, here is their press kit. I feel after reading this, you’ll understand the band far better than any words of praise from Modern Fix.
“In the year 2014 in the ruins of the city once known as Los Angeles, three underworld dwellers with one job, one hot tub and one unkillable riff between them knew they had to make a ripping record – or die trying. This is their story.
Guitarist Jed, bassist Patrick, and drummer Bobby started in a room lit by a single green light, which changed them from humans to Zig Zags in the summer of 2010. Within the next four years, they’d record a song with Iggy Pop and an album with Ty Segall and go from playing house parties for pizza to staring off the stage at the Fillmore West. But back then that was still in the future.
Before them had come giants—bands like Kiss and Sabbath whose names were carved into desks in detention for decades. Before them had come mutants, heavy metal and punk bands like the Dictators and Pentagram that spun into the void of history after failed orbital rendezvous with the fame they’d deserved. And before them had come freaks, one-known-copy private press insanities like J.T. IV, White Boy and the Average Rat Band, the bands that happened when someone with a guitar thought FUCK IT loud enough for the tape to pick up. Those were visionaries, each of them, even if most of them paid—or never got paid—for it.
And Zig Zags had a vision, too. It was a dark and weird one, the kind of thing you see flickering on the monitor when your stolen spaceship wakes you up from cryosleep, or the kind of thing that flashes across the inside of your forehead when you wake up hungover from sleeping in your van. Theirs was the nightmare of the insane and the all-too-normal, the Bermuda Triangle between sci-fi and lo-fi and no-budget, the Twilight Zone twist ending where it turns out everyone ELSE was an alien the whole time.
When Cliff Burton wore that Misfits shirt—Zig Zags. When the Emergency Broadcast System interrupts that John Carpenter movie—Zig Zags. When a soggy pile of Thrasher mags and Jack Kirby comics spill out of a dumpster behind the Sunday School—Zig Zags. When the Ramones were scared of the basement and the Angry Samoans couldn’t find the right side of their mind—Zig Zags. When a kid breaks his elbow copying a WWF heel’s piledriver and starts laughing instead of crying—Zig Zags. And when the electricity goes off forever and torchlight reflects off chrome—Zig Zags.
All of this and more becomes real on the Zig Zags’ self-titled debut LP, recorded and produced by Ty Segall for In The Red. In 12 songs, they chainsaw through weirdo film and caveman rock and space noise and make smart sound so dumb it turns inside-out and becomes brilliant. Their very first 7” had a song scalled “Scavenger” cuz that’s what Zig Zags do—dig through garbage to find genius. In 2014, it turns out they did make their ripping record. But it’s up to you to figure out the twist ending.
The band was on tour in the UK most of the fall of 2019. Only sporadic US dates are on the books for 2020. The band has a ton of merch and other info here: zigzags.bandcamp.com
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And this one is really good as well, ‘Magic’
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