Welsh trio The Bug Club make a lot of noise in a small space. Every Single Muscle, their fifth LP and third for Sub Pop, gets moving with the full-throttle chug of “Miss Wales 2012,” then keeps packing eighteen songs into tight, mostly brief bursts. Sam Willmett’s guitar and Tilly Harris’s bass trade riffs and vocals over Tom’s crisp drumming, with hooks, call-and-response parts and just enough room for a two-second solo gag. “Full Range of Motion” has a clipped Minutemen feel, “Cut to Black” brings a falsetto vocal and a Neu!-like motorik pulse, and “All My Clothes Fell Off” slows down before building toward classic-rock drama. The closer swaps guitars for keys, another small left turn in a record that refuses to leave anything in the car.
The jokes are pointed at the human body this time. Songs inspect appearance, organs, friendship and the strange problem of having a body at all, with the band’s usual deadpan absurdity keeping the whole thing from becoming heavy. It’s punky, hooky and deliberately overstuffed, closer to a live-wire garage set than a polished studio exercise. Anyone drawn to short songs, wiry guitar interplay and lyrics that can turn a shopping list of body parts into a chorus will find plenty here, especially if Wire, Sparks or early Sub Pop-adjacent garage rock are already in the rotation.
