Black Toska, out of Madrid, plays a lurid electric blues punk, sheathed in reverb and drenched in gothy drama. The drums that open 'A Gloomy Dawn' gallop like the devil's on their tail, wildly, explosively, all over the toms and just this side of control. Big slashes of doomed surf guitar crash over the mix, and the singer comes at you as if from the bottom of a well, with an Elvis-y snarl and an operatic vibrato. It's like John Spencer without all the arch theatricality or Rocket 808 in less of a growl and more of a croon.

Black Toska is a four-piece with Diego Fernández De La Hoz on guitar and his (likely) brother Jorge on bass. Miguel Ángel Santos plays those intensely agitated drums, while Victor Garcia sings in a fluttery, ultra-dramatic tenor. The band has been around since the late teens, with a couple of Spanish-issued EPs and some digital singles under its belt.

Dandelions is currently only available in digital form, six tracks of intense, midnight phosphorescence that glower ominously through your ear buds. 'Love of Mine' pummels the four with sharp, stinging guitar and thumping drums, all hard angles and forward momentum. Yet within this rigorous structure, Garcia sings a melody like a poison flower, curving and perfumed and deadly, insinuating things like 'Love of mine, oh love of mine, oh love of mine, the pouring rain is going to clean the roofs tonight.'

The songs maintain an unhealthy preoccupation with violence. Bass growling 'Splinters' imagines love as a form of torture ('sometimes you put the splinters under my skin and go'). It starts as a slow-moving threat, then double times in jittery release. 'Grey Shadows' slouches into view like a dangerous animal, dropping lyric fragments about graves and shadows. Even the title track, about the ubiquitous yellow weed, puts an uneasy vertigo under lyrics about seeds and surreptitious growth. There's a hammer blow heaviness to the shouted chorus, drumsticks doing a danse macabre on the rims.

The EP is uniformly compelling, with a strong sense of what it is but a lot of variation within those parameters. Recommended if you like stylized, noire-ish songs about love and murder.

Jennifer Kelly