3 out of 5

Label: ActionBoy 300 Records

Produced by: Lustre King

I’ll go to bat for plenty of uncelebrated bands, but I feel like even amongst the math rock inner-ring, Lustre King are generally considered a solid stepping stone type group – a good opener; a good addendum. Their followup album to this EP is a bit more rounded and defined; Money Shot is kind of anything but the punctuation its title suggests, consisting of somewhat besides-the-point attempts at smashing together Slint’s pained art rock and Dazzling Killmen-adjacent punk – tracks that dance around a conclusion and then cut out, unceremoniously. On the one hand, there’s kind of a Conformists-like fuck-off attitude to that, but it carries a bit of a poseur vibe here; again – like this is the band thanked in the liner notes of the headliner.

However, the final two cuts on this disc give up trying to sound so brash and avoidant, and deliver solid, thick grooves and riffs, but with an underpinning of ‘tude that, if anything, feels like the group’s calling card – think of a less-focused Oxes. These tracks give more weight to what works in what precedes, but I’d still say this is a primer for Lustre’s superior album, and otherwise beneficial as short filler in your math-rock playlist.