JM Houle

By all means, click to enlarge

Brooklyn's Shark? finally released their Kickstarter-aided first full-length True Waste three Tuesdays ago, and we can safely report that the 12-track production is a Barney Gumble burp of garage-punk bar-band excellence. Think Blood on the Wall haunted by late-period Morrison's demon. We still are, but maybe that's because of True Waste's "disgustingly awesome" (their words) wall-spatter cover art by photographer JM Houle, which, as you can see, resembles an ungodly expulsion. So what is that nastiness?

Mark Ruffalo is in a Brooklyn band?

Brooklyn's Shark? are a greasy splat of post-garage splendor, a remarkably consistent four-man blast of dive-bar jukebox rock who've been kicking around your Cake Shops and Don Pedros for a minute now--if we were in the business of using words like "underrated," we might consider slapping it on these guys. After giving away two homespun EPs at shows and online, Shark? crowd-sourced finances to record their first studio full-length last summer, ultimately raising more than $1500 and offering benefactors who donated more than $100 the chance to choose song subjects. So what topics did people pick? "Numbers, The Best Day Ever, Chicken N' Eggs, and a dog named Winston," frontman Kevin Diamond writes over e-mail. The tracks, he says, are "weird and fun, we're having a good time writing them. The song about The Best Day Ever is about meeting The Replacements."

L Magazine's repeatedly endorsed these lo-fi monsters, having them play more than anyone else at last month's Northside Festival, getting the official Conklin must-see nod, and doling out an Honorable Mention in their annual 8 NYC Bands You Need To Hear series. And with good reason. The foursome's Noise Maker EP from this past January, available for free download here, is post-garage excellence: sober Cheeseburger, Blood on the Wall weaned on Jim Morrison instead of Thurston Moore, the circa-2001 Strokes if they were messy and didn't suck. So while Shark? has collectively given away two EPs both online and at shows, frontman Kevin Diamond recently initiated a Kickstarter campaign to help defray recording expenses of their first full-length and set a goal of $1500. Their formal pitch: