Till Plains Do Everything Right All The Time Always

photo by Chris Grannon

There are many bands in Cincinnati and one of them is called Till Plains and they do everything that I love and I wish to tell you about them. They’ve made two very brief and absurdly fantastic EP’s and a split single with the Dopamines (which I regrettably haven’t gotten yet), and most of the members look like lumberjacks. This is an important detail because it might help explain why their brand of punk falls somewhere within the realm of my favorite pretend subgenre, “beard punk.” For a point of reference, they’re similar to Dillinger Four in that they exist in that sweet spot between gruff pop-punk and post-hardcore (with more emphasis on the latter). Except they’re a whole lot smarter (and artier!) than that band. And they don’t have an obnoxiously drunk fat man who rants in between every song about how various persons can hang from his balls. But I digress.

Both EP’s are only 4 stingers long. I highly recommend getting both and burning them together on the same disc so’s you can listen to a solid 20 minutes of the best punk that ever came out of Cincinnati over and over again. The best bit of their recorded repertoire is the one-two combo of “A Complaint” and “Eyeroller” that opens their Nails Mountain EP. The former is a fifty-second blast of panicked downstrokes and a stop-start nailgun riff. The latter blooms out of some minimal bass guitar negative space (dudes even brought on this free-jazzing saxophonist for this part last time I saw em live and it was cool as shit), before abruptly diving into “Eyeroller” proper, a fierce hardcore rumbler rich with jawdropingly killer rhythmic twists and this guitar line that manages to devour itself. Similar heroics happen in “Full Gulp Pulls,” opener of their We Neither EP, which features a sinister ascending guitar movement and impossibly perfect drum fills that have (and this has actually happened) taken my breath away. “Older Foxes,” their most pop-punkiest hot jam that gets all gets all the girls dancing (and contender for best Till Plains song), has this bit where the drums lock into one of those sixteenth-note hi-hat beats accompanied by a surprisingly chipper guitar line. On paper, a pop move like that would usually gross me out, but when they leave that farty bass tone totally exposed and some croaky vocals come in to sing about “running slow, like older foxes,” I can’t help but have a stupid, satisfied grin on my face.

Vocally, these guys are experts at writing these awesome yell-along parts. The chorus of “Laser Shapes” hits the breaks for half a second before you get a tidal wave straight to the face with a great big “OH NO!” The aforementioned “Eyeroller” has a great “Oh-o! Oh-o!”, and an unreleased new one (that I’ve only heard live) features probably the most infectious hook of all with the urgent repetition of “Break it up, break it up!” Anyways, it isn’t very often that music this vital crops up nowadays, and you’d be doing yourself a colossal disservice if you don’t check them out. You can download the We Neither EP from their myspace page, Nails Mountain is available through Phratry Records, and their split with Dopamines is available through It’s Alive Records. They’ve got bunches of new songs and keep teasing about maybe making a full-length. No idea when that’ll happen, but God I need that thing BAD.

-m