Fungi Girls, “Swim Dogs”

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Fungi Girls Swim Dogs

Fort Worth’s Fungi Girls hold an interesting place within the context of the post-garage / psych scene that blew up in the last part of the aughts and early two-thousand-and-teens. Most of the bands were dominated by an older generation of musicians who actually grew up listening to Back From The Grave comps and bands like the 13th Floor Elevators, but the Fungi Girls were but wee lads when they broke onto the national landscape with their Hozac-released Some Easy Magic—none of the band’s members had even reached the legal drinking age when the record came out. Four years later, and we’re now entering a post-post-garage era with guitars on the wane, so it would be safe to question: what does a band, who is only now coming into their prime, do when their sound is already rooted in the past?

Besides the Old Foamy EP released early in 2014, the Fungi Girls have been laying relatively low since 2011, but it sounds like that is about to change with word of a new, limited edition tour-only cassette. Titled Place Unknown, Fungi Girls will bring along 200 copies of the cassette with them when they hit the road with Buenos Aires’ Los Cripis later this month, with a 7-inch and vinyl release to follow courtesy of Gnar Tapes. The first offering, “Swim Dogs”, would suggest a more confident stride to their psych rock leanings. No longer hidden behind the texas twang a la the Strange Boys, Fungi Girls are wielding the axe with bravado in “Swim Dogs”, bringing in some ’90s grunge rhythms to their garage roots. Think Dave Grohl playing drums for the Kinks and you have a pretty apt description. Then again, this is all written with the idea that Fungi Girls feel a need to change your perception of what is cool. But as the chorus says, “Gotta do what I gotta do, can’t worry about you anymore.”

You can stream “Swim Dogs” below. Place Unknown will be available on tour and for download on their Bandcamp (where you can also stream the second single “Good Cops”), and scroll on for Fungi Girls tour dates with Los Cripis.

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