By: Jake Wallace & Victor Van Ommen
Album Type: Full Length
Date Released: 28/10/2016
Label: E.One Heavy |
SPV Steamhammer
“Gold” is more than an album, it’s an
invitation to get your ass down to the rock show and have it get beat in the
pit.
“Gold” CD//DD//LP track listing:
1). Playing Poor
2). Baby Teeth
3). Participation Trophy
4). Mental Illness as Mating
Ritual
5). Ghost Trash
6). Charlie Chaplin Routine
7). Of Course You Do
8). I See You Are Also
Wearing A Black T-Shirt
9). Bloody Like the Day you were
Born
10). I Have A Prepared
Statement
The Review
The album has an impressive 10 tracks and each one is a brutal, unrelenting assault in its own right. The other mind-blowing aspect of this band, is the fact that despite only having 3 members, they manage to create a towering, heavy sound. To kick things off, Track 1 is called 'Playing Poor'. The first few seconds give you a taste of what's to come with that rumbling fuzz bass and before you can register what's going on, the song takes off into their trademark style of aggressive noise punk. It's a super tight unit and the vocal style fits the tempo and heaviness of the riffs wonderfully.
'Baby
Teeth' comes next and tips the scale into sludgier
territory. The guitar and bass tones are heavy as Christ and the drums
pummel away like a sledgehammer. The breakdowns towards the end with
isolated bass are great and once the whole unit comes back in again it is
carnage. If you had any baby teeth before this song started, you'll be sure to
be spitting them out once it's over. 'Participation Trophy' is the third
track on the album. Another ripping riff to begin with and then the vocals
start to take the lead, shouting every syllable with utmost viscerality. Parts
of the vocals on this track remind me of Maynard James Keenan after smoking 100
Marlboro with a throat infection. Very heavy shit indeed.
'Mental
Illness As Mating Ritual' has one of the many
excellent song titles on this record. Whores. are merciless when it comes to riff
writing and every last one of them are ferocious. The thick, fuzz bass fills
every crevice of space in the low-end and the guitar has freedom to run riot on
top of it. 'Ghost Trash' comes next and begins with a Clutch-styled riff before going
into one of the many isolated bass breakdowns. The dynamics of having little
touches of clean guitar among this monstrosity is a great effect and when the
pedals are kicked in, you really notice how powerful the riffs are. The drums
are particularly great on this track with some excellent fills between the
episodes of manic noise-craft.
'Charlie
Chaplin Routine' ups the tempo and delivers a
crucifying barrage of instrumentation. High octane behaviour that
crosses a brief area of sludge halfway through before returning to the
fast-paced wrecking ball that the song started with. 'Of
Course You Do' is a straight up stoner rock track in the vein of Kyuss
or Melvins
and has some fantastic drumming keeping the ship afloat. There are some killer
riffs in this track and it never loses steam as they keep churning out the
goods. The last section at around 3 minutes sounds like a flight of hornets
besieging a burning city to eradicate any living survivors. Devastatingly
heavy.
Track 8 ‘I See
You Are Also Wearing A Black T-shirt' wins my award for the best song title
of 2016. Coarse screaming vocals leading the onslaught with pure disdain for
whatever makes him so angry. This track has a bit more of a traditional punk
structure and the riffs are so weighted that Chuck Norris may need a few extra
eggs in the morning to attempt to carry them.
'Bloody Like the Day You Were
Born' is the penultimate track on the album. It is maybe one of the
angriest sounding tracks on the album and the atmosphere is filled with
psychotic fury. Yet again, they make superb use of the sections without guitar,
allowing the bass sounds to permeate through and provide a pedestal for the 6
string to rear its ugly neck.
The final track on the album 'I Have a Prepared Statement' is without a doubt my favourite track.
Saving the best for last and all that. It begins with some guitar feedback
which gives way to the beast lurking behind. The patient drums help build the
moment up and the faint sound of the bass riff under the feedback makes you
want to beg for the guitar to rip in and complete the trifecta. And it does.
One of the best riffs I've heard in a long while and the vocals
linger nicely between words to drag out this powerhouse. The lyrics 'I'm
gonna sink this ship, down, down down!' are extremely catchy and
seem to use up every last drop of energy that Christian Lembach has. The brief
false stop at 4:40 makes you desperately hope the riff will return and before
that thought has time to process... it's on top of you. It's a hugely
impressive track and definitely what I would've picked to close the album.
Whores. displays a keen sense of what makes a song a song
by making sure that each riff, verse, or drum fill spins violently around a
hooky chorus, like water does a drain. Coupling hard rhymes with a gruesome
distortion on pretty much every instrument is the formula that makes these
songs burst at the seams, literally. “Gold”
is therefore more than an album, it’s an invitation to get your ass down to the
rock show and have it get beat in the pit.
“Gold” is available everywhere now
