No Reasons, the first album from Philadelphia band Women, sounds like it was vomited up onto the sidewalk from some Lower East Side gutter circa 1978. It oozes the filth and grime of that era while eschewing the a lot of the casual racism, misogyny and homophobia of that era’s gutter punks making the album the equivalent of self consciously stupid garage punks choosing to emulate the Killed By Death compilations rather than the Back From the Grave series.

I only have a passing familiarity with that semi-genre of punk rock, so I can’t really point to any particular lifts or specific similarities, but the feeling I picked up seemed to be supported by the band’s Bandcamp page where they’ve tagged themselves both with “Killed By Death” and the popular abbreviation “KBD.”

The band itself tries to marry together Garage Punk with that brand of ignorant punk and it works quite well to create something that carries the energy and enthusiasm of both, while disregarding overt polemics, keeping the politics personal if they’re revealed through the lyrics at all.

The initial thought while listening to the album is that it’s littered with the kind of hedonistic nihilism of gutter living but the lyrics are at time so over the top that it’s difficult to take them at face value especially when they’re delivered in a slurred anti-melodic style that hobbles along like a stray dog.

When the lyrics don’t approach that level of excess they’re really quite good. For example, the opening lines to “Dead World”, an atypical eco-disaster song that is not so much about Earth worship but is instead tinged with the kind of sad anger that seems almost closer to folk music.

“All this blood and bones are dinosaurs, we dig through the ground to begin another pile of corpses/ In this bitter wasteland, we found another no man’s land.”

Even buried in songs is often a turn of phrase that can catch you: “Pull out all the knives from a city full of backs tonight.” “I don’t trust my memories. What they did to me, if you only knew, what they did to me through my window.” “His heart is full of razor blades.”

Going through the few lyrics that are available, it makes me wonder what I’m missing outside of songs like “Radiation.” Speaking of “Radiation,” that and “Jeffry’s Party” have been re-recorded from their previous self-titled 7” release. The new recordings and mixes sound great.

The music side of the project is good but not great. The intended catchy edges are there which pull the listener into the mud, the songs in the genre have a tendency to blend together creating a beige pastiche, but that’s never really a danger here as various influences are folded together to create something, if not entirely new, entirely exciting.

Overall, No Reasons is a very strong first album from Women who have managed to build upon their previous release’s strength while not losing sight from whence they came. Get this. It’s available in physical media for $10 from FDH records and Resurrection Records, or you can get a digital release in any format for $5.