Mister Goblin's third LP may be named for a soft little lettuce chewer, but that doesn't mean it lacks bite. Actually, Bunny is the fiercest addition to his catalog yet. Mister Goblin began as the singular, imaginative offspring of Baltimore boy Sam Goblin. As a solo project, he discovered a remarkable sweet spot between pop-punky folk and late '90s, post-grunge feedback- a hybrid that might not have had any life in this world, or any other, before he brought it into existence. After briefly dipping his ladle in the Iron & Wine end of the indie pool on his 2021 album Four People in an Elevator and One of Them is the Devil, he's back to his old ways on Bunny- sans the folk but flush with a serious cindery burn a la parasol pyros Failure. Bunny doesn't totally replace the band's former mix of sounds, but rather enhances them. The residue of cooked-down, pop-punk sugar is hinted at in the caramelized outline of hooks on tracks like "Good Son/Bad Seed," but with a new crunchy hard-coating of guitar noise around them which gives each a crackling, tooth-chipping spike, similar in flavor and palate to the contemporary hardcore/shoegaze crossover of Dazy. You don't have to search long for the evidence of his change in direction either. The heart of Bunny's burning cry is heralded from the first fiery notes of the opening track "Military Discount," a blistering and dramatic push and pull that recalls the gripping post-hardcore angst of early Single Mothers in equilibrium with the slacker ethos of Toadies or Silverchair. Bunny has its tamped-down moments for sure, but for the most part Sam sounds electric, like Chris Stutter of Meat Wave backed by 3/4s of the original Everclear lineup, all doing their best to convince you that you're listening to unreleased Jawbox tracks circa My Scrapbook Of Fatal Accidents- angular guitars allying between the clipped spaces of trimming downstrokes, submerged within leagues of watery feedback, and pressing into urgent, snarling pop melodies that will sock the air out of you like a knee in the gut at a Vision of Disorder show. Most of the lyrics are absurdist in the sense that they seem to be about ordinary things, tinted by a melancholily that intimates the profound, but which is obscured by sadness and the cloud of the mundane. Bunny is a significant escalation of the established Mister Goblin sound and general concept, giving it both a determined sense of forcefulness as well as more resilient roots. I'm really glad Sam found this one in him.
