Way Out West With The Hellflowers!

Photo by Scott Evanskey

Shock Treatment: Let’s begin with some introductions! Who’s all in The Hellflowers and what does everyone do in the band?

The Hellflowers: Christina Hellflower- lead vocals/rhythm guitar, Matt Eskew -Bass, Alex Mack - Lead Guitarist, Stevyn Grey - Drums


Shock Treatment: What’s the origin story of the band, how did you all meet and decide to play music together?

The Hellflowers: Christina and Matt started this band in LA in 2015. After a couple line up changes we were lucky that Matt was friends with Stevyn. When the spot became available we couldn’t wait to ask him and were super lucky he accepted! Haven’t looked back since. After our second guitarist could no longer play with us we were doing acoustic shows. One of those shows was with Billy Bones of “The Skulls”. He said he knew just the guy (after telling him we needed a new lead guitarist) and boy was he correct! He put us in touch with Alex and again we haven’t looked back.



Shock Treatment: You guys released an EP of fantastic cover songs called Teenage Radio last year on Rum Bar Records. What all goes into the decision making process of picking a cover song to record and release?

The Hellflowers: Being such big music junkies it is tricky picking cover songs. I mean, you could record 100 of them, I’m sure. Each one has its own story and we could go on forever with that. But basically, the songs that we chose our songs that we have loved most of our life. I just have to make sure I can sing them well 😉(Christina).


Shock Treatment: How did you guys meet up with Malibu Lou and Rum Bar Records?

The Hellflowers: Stevyn was dealing with some health problems for a little while so he had to kind of step out for a bit. Richie Boom Boom of FOXY/The Glimmer Stars stepped up. I think Lou discovered us through Richie. We are grateful for Richie’s time in The Hellflowers and appreciate the connect to Lou. We think Lou is absolutely fabulous!

Photo by Brian Paine

Shock Treatment: Just going off the cover songs you guys release, people can kind of tell what to expect from The Hellflower's music. But what influences do you guys bring into the band that might not be so obvious to your fans?

The Hellflowers: Christina’s previous band was a honky Tonk outfit called Kit & The Branded men so influences like Loretta Lynn and Buck Owen’s may be less obvious.


Shock Treatment: I feel like a lot of Hellflowers songs are very sincere and heartfelt. Do you find playing music in this way therapeutic at all?

The Hellflowers: 100% All of these songs are straight from the heart! For me personally (Christina), after taking a year off, I realized that I couldn’t live without creating and performing. The anxiety and depression were overwhelming.



Shock Treatment: So The Hellflowers are currently based in Los Angeles. What’s it like being in an active band in L.A. right now and how has it changed since you guys first started out in 2019?

The Hellflowers: I would say it’s changed dramatically. Covid made a lot more people become home bodies. Also, financial and other reasons people don’t want to get out as much as they used to. We now realize the most important thing is to play all ages shows because we noticed a big jump in young people going to shows. So we really try to focus on that.


Shock Treatment: You guys recently played the Sofa Street Fair in San Jose. How was that experience?

The Hellflowers: Absolutely fabulous! Matt is from San Jose so we always get a great homecoming there. People were super enthusiastic and we got a lot of positive feedback from that show and new fans!

Photo by Tony Smith

Shock Treatment: What lies in store for the rest of 2026 for The Hellflowers?

The Hellflowers: Next up for us is Dr Strange Summer Bash in Pomona Memorial Day weekend with a crazy stacked lineup. We play Saturday the 23rd so make sure to get your tickets if you haven’t yet. Plus, many more shows, including sailor Jerry fest and Oahu Hawaii. Heading back into the studio soon to finish our 3rd full length album. Singles should be coming in the next few months, so make sure to follow us in all of our socials. Link tree is in our Instagram bio so you don’t miss anything!


Shock Treatment: Where can people go to listen to your music and buy your records or merch?

The Hellflowers: We’re on Spotify, Apple Music. Bandcamp. Tons of music. iOS on YouTube including one we released a few days ago!

Excess Blood - Porcelain Doll 7" Review

As the light fades from your eyes, the world as you once knew it begins to seem like a distant memory. All the love you won, unfulfilled promises, and unmet achievements mean absolutely nothing anymore. Memory comes to you in quick sudden flashes, random and violent. It is at this moment that you start to realize you are passing from one realm to the next. The walls close in and a manic desperation fires through all four of your limbs like lightning strikes. It's about now that you start to realize you aren't passing into the storied empire of ivory and gold that was fed to you as a child. This place you start to behold feels cold and paralyzing. Similar are the unnerving emotions Excessive Blood extracts from within your psyche with this record. These four songs on the band's new 7" Porcelain Doll emit intense and twisted reverberations of panic, loss, and regret. 

Excess Blood are a band from Portland, Oregon and this is their debut 7", put into the world by Unlawful Assembly records. The songs arrive fully gelled and molded into a stabbing type weapon to pierce your soul. This record has no doubt in the direction in which it wants go in. Try to imagine abrasive dark bands like Bauhaus or Birthday Party mixed with early TSOL. This is what best describes the taste in my mouth that I'm left with after listening to this record and that I'm in no hurry to wash out. This isn't some pouty goth band, sulking in the corner, crying out for attention. Excess Blood gets bold, angry and in your face. They come from the darkness, and wish you welcome you into their fold. A darkness that many of us want to deny its existence, but that we're all too familiar with. Excess Blood are as much a punk band as they are a darkwave or goth band. These songs were born in the unlit woodlands of the pacific northwest. Those ancient woods no doubt harbor many sinister secrets, and this band was one of their most guarded, until now.

instagram.com/excess.blood

unlawfulassembly.bigcartel.com

Automatic Lovers LP Review

Automatic Lovers are a four piece punk rock n' roll band out of Madrid, emphasis and underline the "punk" in that. These guys reach back into the musical ethos and grab their influences from only the meanest bands and the most venomous songs. This is Automatic Lover's debut LP after releasing an explosive 7" last year on Wap Shoo Wap Records, same label that's putting out this equally as searing LP. It's records like this one and the Sick Shooter's LP that came out earlier this year, that prove Wap Shoo Wap are a label to watch closely. 

Now close your eyes, plant both feet on the ground and ball your fists up as tight as you can. Because this record emits a blast capable of leaving an impact crater of extinction level size right under your feet. If you want to get a taste, think Dead Boys, Slaughter and The Dogs, with a little Hanoi Rocks prowl and you've got an alternate recipe for pure dynamite. But if you think Automatic Loves just wear a costume and put on a fun little puppet show of the past, you're dead wrong. Sure this band takes more from the past than the present (thank god for that), but they put their heart and soul into these songs. You can hear it, it's undeniable. This is the stuff you can't fake. You're in it or you aren't, there's no riding the middle lane on this one. 

Automatic Lovers play the kind of music that got me excited for rock n roll, or even punk in the first place. The music is loud, rude, and in your face. I wouldn't expect anything less from the band themselves as well. Do these songs contain the meaning of life, are they going to usher in a brighter future? Hell no they aren't and they shouldn't. Figure that shit out for yourself!  Automatic Lovers are here as a wall to lean on after a hard day, a shitty drive, and a life that sometimes doesn't work out as it should. Are you going to cry about it, or are you going to put a fist through a wall and fight the good fight again tomorrow? Because we need to take pleasure in the small things in life. The kinds of things we can grab and hold on to. And a great rock n' roll record is one of them. The Automatic Lovers just gave us a solid handle to grab hold of as the rollercoaster of life continues to throw us around. If more records like there were made these days, I might start to think we'll be ok.    

instagram.com/automatic.lovers

wapshoowaprecords.bandcamp.com

An interview with Astrologer!

Interview conducted with singer/songwriter Andrew Cline

Shock Treatment: Let's start off by telling me who all are in Astrologer at this very moment as we speak?

Andrew: Starting with the tough questions! This one is always hard to answer… people pretty much view Astrologer as my project because I’m the songwriter, or Candy and I, since we are sort of a duo! That said, at any given time, we have several other people I would consider members of the group in some fashion. Wyatt Blair, Don Bolles, Joel Tyler Wall, Blake Garmon, and Nick Florence have all been involved with us both live and in our recorded output intermittently since we began.



Shock Treatment: What is the Astrologer conception story? How did you guys meet and decide to play music together?

Andrew: I started Astrologer after my last band broke up. I played one show under that name in 2020 with two of my friends in Phoenix, Andrew Jemsek and Eddie Horn. Then, the pandemic happened, and it changed the trajectory of the entire project. I moved to the woods and kept writing by myself. Wyatt Blair would check in with me now and again (we are friends,) and invited me to go to LA and record an album for his label, lolipop records. Nick came onboard shortly after; Candy and Don after that, Blake and Joel after that!

As far as how we met and came to play music together, it was all rather serendipitous. Wyatt, Nick, and I had known each other for several years and had worked together on a band before Astrologer in the 2010’s. Nick and I knew Blake from his own band, DOMS, who we had played with many times. I met Don around 2017 and we became friends when he came to DJ a show I did in Phoenix. He stayed at my house for a week and broke up with his girlfriend (who was with him) during that week. I guess that made our meeting a bit more memorable… Candy and I met at the haunted Hotel Monte Vista in Flagstaff and hit it off immediately, we’ve been together ever since!

Shock Treatment: Tell me about the Astrologer sound. You guys have unique songs that are hard to directly pinpoint influences to. Some say power pop, some say pop/shoegaze, and some are a bit on the psychedelic side. Is this by design?

Andrew: Yes, it is by design, in fact! A fellow named Jon Mills who has a magazine called Shindig! recently included our song “Ball & Chain” on a playlist, accompanied by an article about “The New Pop Explosion.” He said that the new bands he’s been hearing the last few years are less beholden to genre rules, so he sees it as a sort-of throughline of us and our contemporaries. The other bands, some of them are pals of ours like Uni Boys, Billy Tibbals, Josephine Network. Its nice to be included, and I really like the name “The New Pop Explosion.” It reminds me of The Paisley Underground, or something.

Anyway, I think ourselves and our contemporaries share an eclectic taste, and in my case, it would be difficult to separate myself from styles I love to write, just because they don’t have a sameness that other bands and albums might. I listen to a lot of pop and rock music, especially old music. I discern the things I really love and want to emulate to an extent, and do it. I don’t think too much about it when I write, the ideas come into their own as they are written. I just don’t make a point to resist if a song seems like it should be a style that doesn’t fall neatly into a predetermined category.

Shock Treatment: The band is currently based in Phoenix, my home town! How do the crowds treat you guys when you play live? Do the Phoenicians seem pretty receptive to the sweet sweet sounds of Astrologer?

Andrew: Yes, I’m a fourth generation Phoenician! Very proud of where I come from.

Now, about the crowds… I have never been the type to pack houses for shows. We have done all right, but generally, I come from the bedroom. I am sort of a perennial outsider, and I don’t love to perform. Performing requires going out on a regular basis and being in loud, crowded places. It drives me to drink… I like recording best, to be honest.

Not to say people never like us when they see us. We have gone through many incarnations live; for the Astrologer Fleetwood Sprawl shows we mostly played as a 3 piece with backing tracks, since the nature of that album was lo-fi and recorded in our friend’s living room. Once a lady came up to us after one of those shows and cried and said I have a beautiful voice. I think about that a lot!

Shock Treatment: Astrologer has a new LP coming out June 1st titled Maiden America on Lollipop Records. This will be the follow up to 2024’s Fleetwood Sprawl. What can people expect from this new record and how do you feel it differs from the last LP?

Andrew: Well, the last one was a kind of love letter to My Phoenix, so to speak. The cover has all Phoenix artifacts and figures on it… Candy and Blake and I recorded that album mostly in his living room at our apartment complex, the Fleetwood. At one point, pretty much everyone in the band lived there. The album was really a double album, it was an hour long. A sprawling mess! But it was a beautiful time and some of my best songs are on that album. I think lolipop is going to release a truncated LP version of it this year, we’ll see!

Maiden America is sort of a middle point, I suppose. Our first EPs (Legerdemain L & R) and our first album, Eternal Friday, were almost schizophrenic with the genre jumping, mostly because we recorded them during the pandemic and the mindset was: who knows if we will ever make another album, what if everyone dies, etc? Astrologer Fleetwood Sprawl was a direct response to Eternal Friday and its more polished, studio approach. Eternal was a pop record, Sprawl was a bedroom record, and Maiden America is a balance of the two.

We recorded Maiden with Don Bolles and Joel Tyler Wall at their respective spaces, and the idea was to make it just sound like how we are, which, I suppose, at heart, is a garage band. I cut the songs that were too wildly different than the rest and made a simple, straightforward, 30 minute album. It has the cohesion of a band just playing in the garage together; it is the most true-to-life sounding of our albums, so far.

Shock Treatment: And speaking of Lollipop Records, I interviewed Wyatt Blair long long ago for another site I used to do and I found him to be an incredibly nice guy. How did Astrologer’s relationship begin with him and his label?

Andrew: Wyatt IS an incredibly nice guy, and ultimately, the reason Astrologer has been fortunate enough to make several albums!

I was told about Wyatt, of all people, by Paul Collins of The Nerves and The Beat. I was in Brooklyn in 2016 recording an EP and was introduced to Paul when he came to the studio to appear on a cover my last band did of “Walking Out on Love.” We got to chatting and eventually, he just asked point blank, “Do you know Wyatt Blair?” I told him I didn’t, and he said, when you get back home, you should look him up. You would probably get along. So I did, and we do!

Shock Treatment: And speaking of newness, you also have a comp coming out called Cavalcade of Stars Volume One on your new label Candyland Record Company. Tell me a bit about this mysterious new compilation and the decision to start your own label?

Andrew: I started Candyland Record Company this year because I saw a void to be filled, notably in Phoenix, but generally everywhere. Like I said before, I came from the bedroom. I grew up recording on a four track tape machine, and a lot of my favorite music is decidedly not radio music, to put it simply. I love the character and imperfection of bedroom music, it is a big part of who I am as an artist and as a listener.

Phoenix has always had a weirdness to it, though I feel like my brand of weirdness that I love and grew up on is noticeably underrepresented. I view myself as a bit of a torch-bearer for the eccentric Phoenix I grew up with. From Wallace & Ladmo, Mike Condello, Hub Kapp, Alice Cooper, Don Bolles, the Meat Puppets, JFA, Jr Chemists, Sun City Girls, on down the line through the stuff I actually grew up around like all the Modified & Trunk Space bands like Colorstore, Ryan Avery, Father’s Day, Treasure Mammal, any number of Andrew Jemsek bands, etc. In recent years I see a lot more bullshit, sad to say. I want the Candyland label and what we stand for to continue the tradition of Phoenix weirdos. And for the readers out there, feel free to take my opinions with a boulder of salt; I am a 40 year old white nerd, after all.

As for the compilation, our first release, it’s called the Cavalcade of Stars Volume One, and it has a ton of great demos, bedroom music, and generally lo-fi recording, half of which is made by Phoenician artists, and the other half by other excellent artists from elsewhere! Famous Phoenician Don Bolles included a song from his first Phoenix punk band, Kray-Zee Homicide, from 1977. That song, “Bionic Girl,” has never seen release! We have some excellent other Phoenix artists like Harrison Hufman, Jaime & the Gnomes, Serene Dominic, and even my own bedroom project, Comfort Corps. The non-Phoenician artists include the wonderful Jad Fair, Prefab Messiahs, Alley Girl, Billy Tibbals… I could go on, but then I’d reach 16 artists and then, well, I couldn’t go on. I implore you to look up anything you can find from these artists; they’re all great, and so are their inclusions on the compilation!

I am hoping to release the LP this summer, so keep an eye out!

Shock Treatment: So I want to get back to the subject of the city of Phoenix itself again. I’ve been noticing a lot of touring bands will now skip over AZ and go north from TX and right into CO then straight west to UT and then over to NV or north to ID and then the west coast. Have you seen this happening? Why do you think Phoenix, the 5th largest city in the FUCKING country is getting the shaft again? Why does Phoenix continue to lack a strong music culture similar to cities its size like Chicago, L.A., New York and Philadelphia?

Andrew: Here’s my hot take/unpopular opinion. And I say this with a great deal of respect and love for my hometown: it is a difficult town for bands who are from here, let alone the bands coming from somewhere else who don’t have a leg up with the right promoters. I have brought/helped several great bands from other cities get shows in Phoenix and Tucson; no surprise, the Phoenix shows were sparsely attended, Tucson always had a bunch of people. I don’t mean to say that Phoenix doesn’t have music fans, it just depends what kind of music, and I’d be willing to guess that the music you and I love and want to see probably doesn’t pack the Crescent, so they have to play small bar shows which don’t always pay enough. That is the state of affairs for all bands nowadays. Even the ones doing well aren’t really doing so hot unless they are above a certain level, financially speaking. It doesn’t always make sense to hit a city where people don’t show up for you. That said, I do wish more stuff I want to see would come through!



Shock Treatment: What does the band have in store for the rest of 2026?

Andrew: We are releasing Maiden America on my 40th birthday, June 1, the first Candyland comp sometime after that, and I’ve been told that a video show we worked on in 2025 should be seeing release around the same time. But that’s another story.

We don’t have any plans to play shows right now. Candy and I just had a son so that is our main priority for now. My little bedroom project, Comfort Corps, is something I am excited about doing; Candy is doing a HI-NRG type thing called Hi-Value… Blake has his band DOMS and his home project Drakkar Noir (also on the comp.) Everyone is feeling happy to do their own thing for the moment, and we still get to hang out and work on things together around the Candyland label!


Shock Treatment: Where can people go to listen to your music, buy your records and follow the band?

Andrew: We are on all the streaming services! You can buy our new record through myself or lolipop, it will be available June 1 and is up for preorder now! Our back catalog you can typically find through me or our Hello Merch store, as wel

Follow us on IG at:
_astrologer_
candylandrecs
comfortcorps

www.lolipoprecords.com

Collaps - Getting Used To The Dirt LP Review

Collaps are a German melodic street punk/oi! band formed in 2022. This here is their second album that came out in late April. Their first record, Executor came out in 2023 on Mendeku Diskak. Musically it falls close to fellow German punk band Oxymoron. Both bands play melodic, hard hitting punk anthems with some mean, rousing hooks. But Collaps throw in a pinch of Motorhead and a dash of Cocksparrer in the mix to make sure the roof of your house gets thoroughly blown off!  

Getting Used To The Dirt houses 11 stellar street anthems about living in a world that is quickly being shrouded in darkness. The first song "Cokehead Politics" paints the picture of a society in chaos and our hypocritical leaders seem to either do nothing or turn their backs completely on their people, further driving the nails into the coffin of society. Some of the other songs like "You Don't Get Shit", "Grinding", and "I Think We're Fucked" paint a picture of class separation becoming such a great divide that it is now so massive, it may be irreparable. The working class is being told to hold the world up while the rich find new and creative ways to spit their wealth in our sweat soaked faces. Collaps are a band that sound like they feel this first hand. 

The second half of the record we get some real stunners like "Away From You", "Grey Man" and "Hostile Ground" which talk about those that have turned their backs on their own people and shout hate and rhetoric nobody wants to be around, the kind that slowly kills the human spirit. Those that have sold their souls for money, power, greed or whatever other evil. Probably my favorite song on the last half of the record is a tune called "A Future" which throws down the gauntlet and declares war. We need, and deserve a better future than the one that's headed our way. We'll be taking control by any means necessary and righting the ship into strady waters. 

Listen to the record here: collapspunk.bandcamp.com

Follow Collaps: instagram.com/collapspunk

Buy the record from the labels below: 

primatorcrew.com

primatorcrew.bandcamp.com

www.oitheboat.com