Gawthrop makes heavy music seemingly possessed of an absolute minimum of subtlety. It’s sludgy, blunt and slow, organized by doom’s worship of the riff as an end in and of itself. But for all the surface-level appearance of caveman-ish stupidity, the Korean band has imbued Kuboa with an unusually literary semiotic range of reference — and your reviewer is still struggling to figure out why this Seoul-based outfit seems to have adopted the name of a tiny hamlet in Yorkshire’s West Riding. Songs on Kuboa like “Jumbo” and “Hogweed” thunder and gurgle as if their ugly sounds were entirely self-justifying, but the mysteries suggested by other elements of the record are by turns teasing and provoking.
Some things on Kuboa, like its music, seem to require little explanation. The title of “Hogweed” signals painful irritation, suppurating boils and nature’s capacity to make us suffer. “Nutria,” perhaps the slowest grind of a song on a very slow record, signals an interest in nature’s tendency to overwhelm human regulatory schemas; see statements from the state governments of Texas, Louisiana and California about the invasive rodents’ persistence and threat to localized ecosystems.
But the title of album opener “Bulbocapnine” is less straightforward. The song thumps and growls, its down-tuned thrums shot through with high-pitched drones and skirls. And no wonder: bulbocapnine is an alkaloid that can induce catalepsy when ingested and has been experimentally used by both the CIA (for real) and by Dr Benway, a recurring character in the fiction of William S Burroughs. Readers of Naked Lunch (1959) will remember Dr Benway as cynical, hugely corrupt and monstrous. Here’s a relevant passage from the novel’s “Benway” episode: “Pending more precise knowledge of brain electronics, drugs remain an essential tool of the interrogator in his assault on the subject’s personal identity…. Bulbocapnine induces a state approximating schizophrenic catatonia … instances of automatic obedience have been observed.”
Slightly less hair-raising is the literary significance of “Granfalloon,” which provides the title of another track on Kuboa. The term comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and the novel’s fictive, transcendentally nihilistic religion Bokononism. In its Bokononist sense, a granfalloon is “a proud and meaningless association of human beings,” such as, Vonnegut asserts, “the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company — and any nation, anytime, anywhere.” More recently we might cite the “proud and meaningless association” of human beings in American public life with the residue of Charlie Kirk’s politico-cultural presence. Nancy Mace is part of that granfalloon. So, it seems, is Ezra Klein. So it goes.
It's tempting to speculate about a possible thematic throughline there: one can think of the compulsory, spiritually empty expressions of fealty to nationalisms or fascisms made by people who are not more authentically captured by those poisonous charms. Fascism works best when we knuckle under and comply in advance, signing loyalty oaths or toeing the line on what can be said. South Korea has its own ascendant nationalist politics, largely associated with the People Power Party and its predilections for martial law and incel-adjacent Idaenam rhetoric. For sure, Gawthrop’s music is bummed out and pissed off about something. In America as well as South Korea, there’s plenty to be pissed off about.
South Korean bum-out specialists Gawthrop work in the sonic overlap between death doom and sludge, with serious emphasis on the excoriating horror of that latter subgenre. There’s more charred fervor in the six tracks on Deterioration than there is intestinal yuck, but as is often the case in death doom, the sluggard pace of Gawthrop’s playing—and the vibe of constricting pressure — feels peristaltic in action. And while singer (if that’s an applicable term here) Sunggun, stage name of one Jang Seong-Geon, hollers more often that he growls, he can also summon some downright alarming tones from deep in his gut. The overall effect of songs like “Blowtorch” or the divertingly titled “Rabbit” puts one in the mind of the scene in Tobe Hooper’s lovably horrendous film version of Stephen King’s The Mangler (1995), in which poor old Mrs Frawley is completely pulverized by an industrial steam-ironing machine. Gawthrop sucks you in, ruthlessly. Charring, constricting and alarming, for sure.
It's not music that leaves you guessing. But still, you may find yourself wondering, “Why ‘Gawthrop’?” So far as this reviewer can discover, it’s an English surname, signaling ancestry from areas in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Those parts of the world can be cold and rainy and dismal, but aside from the vaguely grim atmospherical notes, the reason these guys from Seoul have selected the word as their band name is the most mystifying thing about Deterioration. Perhaps it’s the poetical qualities of the two syllables, in and of themselves, as sounds. There’s an esophageal quality to “gaw-,” suggesting a bolus of gristle stuck in one’s gorge, and “-throp” is close to comical: the sound of a big, upended bowl’s worth of pudding slapping the linoleum. It’s a sludge word, if anything like sludge words exists.
Those semiotic mysteries cease to matter when you get to the last nine minutes of the record. “Odynometer” and “Moth” are merciless mechanisms, engineered to pummel and raze all matter in their path. It’s fearsome music. “Moth” has an especially powerful presence, a nearly gravitational force created by the density of Gawthrop’s downtuned riffage. Sunggun does his best imitation of Ethan McCarthy, which isn’t quite successful — whose could be? But the song lumbers along, and you get caught by its pull. You start thinking about moths and flames. The riff is still churning, crunching, implacable. You’re sweating now. Are you enjoying this? Better spin the record again. Moths and flames.
"MARY SPEAKS" (arr. Daniel E. Gawthrop) performed by The Manitou Singers
O you who bear the pain of the whole earth, I bore you.
O you whose tears gave human tears their worth, I laughed with you.
You, who when your hem is touched, give power, I nourished you.
Who turn the day to night in this dark hour, light comes from you.
O you who hold the world in your embrace, I carried you.
Whose arms encircled the world with your grace, I once held you.
O you who laughed and ate and walked the shore, I played with you.
And I, who with all others, you died for, now I hold you.
May I be faithful to this final test, in this last hour I hold my child, my son;
His body close enfolded to my breast:
The holder held, the bearer borne.
Mourning to joy, darkness to morn.
Open, my arms; thou work is done.
