Ever sliced your hand open on a rusty generator? Ever fished your keys out of a storm-drain clogged with cat hair? Gentlemen‘s raucous LP Sex Tape sounds like all this and much, much more. Take “Wild Pegasus”, for instance: your ears and fists tell you it’s a classic hardcore rager but your feet and hips say it’s something from Soulelujah. The band is adept at making harsh magical hooks with three chords – and yet each song throws a different tapestry of clench-fist madness at you: the slouching wolf intro of “Military Style Massage” into jazzy overlay and a battery of string-clicks; bubbling muck boils into crust stew before acid-rain leads cut through “I Wanna Be A Closer”. And the vocals…you can almost feel the spit hit your face as the frontman’s muffled, barbaric yawps push through the dense gritty backtracks. “Chinese Cigarettes” and “Perry” smack you right between the eyes with a powerful 1-2 punch, and as that Bouncy-Castle-From-Hell collapses into drained rambling vocals, you know the band’s in the pocket. Grab a copy from Homeless Records or Jeth-Row Records, stream below, and savor this ferocious LP.
“DSM” showcases the many individual styles of Brockton’s Van Buren Records
It has been a fruitful 18 months for the Brockton super-collective Van Buren Records. Their two 2021 records, Bad For Press and Black Wall…