The Willowz

Second-Generation Punks The Willowz make songs that sound like a place, their styles signs along the road The Willowz Are Coming—a half-hour debut album released last year, and recorded in a garage when the band were still a three-piece and still in their teens—is raw, gleeful, and full of the unrestrained joy of a group suddenly realizing that the world is a paper bag and their instruments a way of tearing it to shreds, as in "Something," which Michel Gondry picked for the soundtrack of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Early punk bands come to mind, bands that made a sound out of their love of what they did, amateurs and professionals playing amateurs: X-Ray Spex, Kleenex, the Germs. But punk is only part of the Willowz' heritage. From the start, their sound spreads out. Their songs are as much shapes as tunes, short but not easily summarized. This is not the sound of a style or a time. It's more the sound of a place: the sprawl of suburban Los Angeles, where they grew up. Orange County, Anaheim to be precise. Strip malls, middle-class subdivisions, Disneyland. A world where the past is not more than a generation deep, the present is ever expanding, and the future is... more...