I Found This Band...

Digging up the proverbial musical gems from the depths of the Internet.

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The third album in our epic journey here is a split Gusher did with the band Sex Wounds.  I usually like to do splits as a whole, including anyone else who was on it in the review, so I dug around and eventually ended up at the Higher Life record label bandcamp where they have the full album here.  The label has the album as the Peace, Love and Genital Mutilation split, and Gusher has the album as accompanying a 2012 tour, and coming out in August of that year.

Both bands present some pretty incredible music for this album, and Gusher has some of the best work they’ve done up to this point.  The album is incredibly loud, with hints of Sludge and Punk, and these little bites of Shoegaze sprinkled throughout, continuing to evolve the sounds we first started hearing in previous Gusher releases.

Gusher’s half is the former, and is familiar, yet refined, and full of a lot of energy.  With an oncoming tour, you can hear the excitement and the drive to create some super heavy music.  Songs like “Hot Gruncle Pie” and “Army of Orcs” show off Gusher’s super Sludge roots with slow tempos, powering guitar riffs, and shouted vocals.  It’s all very droned out though with tons of distortion and feedback, creating these masses of heavy sound that just weigh on you with intensity.

On the flip side, you then have “Noseleech” that starts with jangled, jagged guitar sounds, and a dreamy melody that leads into an absolutely manic Shoegaze jam.  It’s like hyperactive Pop music as reverberated guitar sounds shriek over a steady and clipping drum beat, while the original melody is transformed into this intense bout of super bendy guitar work that absolutely warps the backdrop.

Sex Wounds take the latter half with a sound that is like intensely low Industrial Rock with crunched out guitars.  Songs walk this line between outright aggression and a subdued, letting-the-noise-wash-over-you feel.  The opening track “Pol-Pot” powers along with smashing drums, rumbling bass lines, and super distorted guitars, but the vocals are airy, distant, and dreamy.

Then you hear songs like “White Fire Alien” and “Drug Lord” that crunch away with incredibly heavy guitars and pounding or blasted out drum beats that back screamed vocals.  Droning, frantic electric tones will violently thrash behind everything, reminding one of the Locust in its mindlessly chaotic seizing.  I really like this vibe as it puts a whole new meaning to the words “noise” and “heavy”, and brings me back to why I got into bands like the Locust in the first place.

As Noise Punk begins to bubble up from the underground, more and more incredible bands start to break the surface and find their way to my library, blowing my mind.  Gusher and Sex Wounds have a great compilation of music here that finds itself nestled comfortable (or perhaps violently?) in this place of Pop, Punk, and Noise that is so cool to hear as an avid fan of all three.  My only complaint is that I couldn’t have seen them on tour.

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Gusher’s next album is another full length by the name of Drought Valley Gruncle-core.  The album came out in November of 2011, and shows off a more melodic and dreamy sound to the band, though very much still hitting that heavy vibe.  The band now lives a little more up to that Shoegaze tag, but does things in a way that I don’t really know if I’ve heard before.

A good chunk of the album leans more in the Sludge camp, you might say, as it has this pounding, yelling, heaviness to it.  But there’s an aggression that seems to parallel a lot of what you see these days in bands that float around the Punk world.  There’s a noisiness with repetitious guitars and hazy vocals, but the attitude still has that smash-your-head-into-a-wall intensity that goes so hand in hand with the genre.

If you listen to “Fierce Lobster University”, you’ll hear an initial headbanging, power verse, with a screeching bridge that stomps along, but kind of floats with melody at the same time.  The end of the song, however, suddenly jumps into this d-beat that alternates with a pounding bridge, totally living up to this Noise Punk vibe.  The instrumentation has a drone that follows alongside this, creating a strange eeriness to the music that adds a whole different kind of flavor to the song.

This drone can be found sprinkled throughout the album, and used in a variety of different ways.  “Magic Dickhead Pilot” begins with a distorted, crunchy guitar that is accompanied by this bending, almost dissonant echoed out guitar melody that seems to lead you into what would be some sort of warped Shoegaze jam.  The band then launches into a very Garage-y format that follows this phrasing, but explodes in sound and aggression all around it.  It’s a fantastic song.

This approach is found throughout this music, and it’s some of the most interesting stuff I’ve heard.  “Sun Powder” has a kind of cooing howl behind the bands hazy Garage Rock, nodding to early Dream Pop and Shoegaze groups, but smearing a load of Noise over everything.  “YOUpholstery” initially reverberates like the contemporaries in the Nu-gaze world, but launches into this super simple little melody with crashing drums and shouting vocals, totally changing the vibe.

Gusher accomplishes a lot with this album, providing an entirely unique style using the sounds they’ve been exploring.  From a few steps back, you get this very noisy, Punk sounding band, but in the subtleties and intricacies, you hear melodies, and drones, and sound experimentation that totally enrich the music in ways not found on an initial listen.  A great followup release.

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Gusher’s first release is a self-titled full length that came out in June of 2011.  It embodies a bunch of different sounds, while remaining altogether heavy, that seem to create a sparkling kaleidoscope underneath harsh and noisy bouts of Rock instrumentation.  It’s one of those albums that seems to continue to show you new things the more you listen to it, making it something I keep returning to.

From the get-go, the album starts off like a Math-y, maybe even Screamo affair, with the fluttering guitars and rolling drums of “Beautiful Transvestite in the Way”, before head-to-wall smashing chugs of guitar and feedback accompany grunts and screams in “Fuck Poetry”.  You start to notice, however, that underneath the raucousness, there’s this twinkling sparkle of electronic tones that seem to fly in the face of what’s going on around them.  There’s a lot more going on here.

The band has one of their labels as Shoegaze on their bandcamp, but at first glance, you wouldn’t really guess this.  But indeed, a lot of subtlety goes into the music you find on this album.  Beyond the Sludge and screams, there are all sorts of drones and screeches.  “Army of Orcs” has a kind of spooky whine, while others will have just a pinch of reverb, or a weird, off-putting feel to the guitars beyond straight up distortion.

Then you have “12 Year Old Bitch”, which has a warbled guitar tone, drifting along eerily behind fuzzy keyboard tones that kind of stroll along in this kind of mindlessly sinister way.  “Red Eyes” will then suddenly dial things back with a more traditional, gliding guitar sound.  But there’s still this groan of noise in the backdrop that keeps the darkness still just under the surface.

Gusher transcends a bunch of stereotypes and styles, while still keeping things in this really heavy, or really sinister place.  The album grew on me more and more as it had sounds that reminded me of Grunge, of Punk, of Screamo, of all sorts of genres and styles I love.  Gusher was really onto something with their first release, so I’d love to see where they go from here.

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Gusher

Hey guys, I’d like to take a week or maybe two to talk about Gusher.  Gusher’s a band out of Albuquerque, New Mexico who have a pretty big variety in sound, but all things are pretty noisy and hit the finer points of Noise and Punk and some Shoegaze.

The band consists of Zacque Dana on drums and vocals, Austin Morrell on guitars, Lee Sillery on bass, and Alec Wilkes also on guitars.  The band has been around since 2011, and have a great spread of five releases (which can be found here) that I’ll be going through, and all of which have some great music on them.  While the band is currently not together, I think it’s worth checking out this music since it’s so interesting, and hey, maybe they’ll come back.

Stay tuned.

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