Shameful Otaku Secret!

 Needs more distortion

From the opening few seconds of Occasion’s first song, “Mew,” it’s pretty apparent that Florida duo the Goslings are not trying to go in any new directions. Actually, those opening seconds sound like some sort of glitch until a simple and absolutely brutal guitar riff creeps out of the distorted mire, followed by singer Leslie Soren’s spaced-out, reverse-echoed vocals. The more you hear the riff, the more it threatens to crush you under the weight of its psychedelic heaviness.

And that’s the main thrust of this album, and of the Goslings in general: heavy, heavy, noisy, and above all psychedelic. Bands like Comets on Fire or Awesome Color, in their stoner-riff vintage style, peddle old-school hard psych effectively enough, but for a real drug-binge experience without chemical aid, you’d be hard pressed to find a more face-melting vibe than the one oozing off the Goslings.

Sometimes the sound is more contemplative, sometimes it’s downright melancholy in that Justin Broadrick kind of way, but it’s never really tense or tightly-wound, and it’s always extremely distorted. Sometimes there are drums for extra crushing power (also distorted), sometimes not, but there is never a fast tempo.

While the Goslings are sticking to what they do best (distortion), it’s not to say they’re not moving forward. Listening to the progression from Between The Dead through Grandeur Of Hair until now, the sound is clearly refining. And by “refining” I mean that they have taken the elements that used to make up their sounds — nasty guitars, distorted drums, spacey vocals — and distilled them into one single textural entity. In fact, whereas before they sounded a bit like a doom metal band with too many distortion pedals, they’re more and more like a psych-heavy noise crew. Perhaps the production aid of grind/noise-meister James Plotkin (O.L.D., Khanate, numerous collabs with Mick Harris and many more) had a hand in that newfound sonic focus.

That is a mixed bag for me; the overall product is awesomely beautiful, but nothing stands out to me. At least nothing as ridiculously grandiose as the epic, melancholy, shoegaze-on-merzbow kick of Grandeur’s “Haruspex.” I was buying what they were selling from minute one, but that song made me want the warehouse.

I suppose saying that there’s no “Haruspex” on the album is a small complaint from such a holy-fuck experience. If you liked the Goslings’ other records, you will almost without a doubt like this one. If you don’t know them, Grandeur of Hair may be a (slightly) better place to start, but I couldn’t recommend against this one. Just killer.

- Mike

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.