Artist: Gnaw
Label: Conspiracy Records
Release: 2009
Length: 37:52
Rating: 2.5/5
Ever bled from your ears? And is that what you’re after? Do you get off on screeching that’s worse than the worst labor pains? Then Gnaw are exactly the band for you! This is not an album for teenagers to listen to. If only for the sheer fun of lyrics like: “Everybody fuckin’, everybody fuckin’, everybody fuckin’, but you!” Gnaw are musical “patients.” They play the mad-as-hell card. And the craziest part of all is the realization that this is solid music! It’s not bad, but it’s also not something that would make you grow eyelashes on the soles of your feet from all the orgasms of what you just heard.
But let’s rewind the tape a bit. The band’s basic goal is to offer music that hasn’t existed before. That’s supposedly the fundamental axiom every band is meant to follow. To pull it off, Gnaw have waded into the nastiest waters of extreme music. It’s metal, it’s industrial, it’s doom. Damn doom! A insane mix. Picture it something like this. You slam out a guitar riff and then literally “smear” it in the studio into a horrifyingly indistinct rumble. You back the whole thing with drums that carry the garage sound of the underworld, full of uncontrolled transitions, pushed way back in the production, while the job of the rhythm is taken over by a hypnotically dispersed, thick riff smear. Genuinely horrifying in sound and character!
And then, of course, the main thing in all this: the vocals! Ever bled from your ears? And is that what you’re after? Do you get off on screeching that’s worse than the worst labor pains? Alan Dubin, former singer of the extreme metal outfits O.L.D. and Khanate, the latter in particular being lords of underground doom. The guy carried that energy over into Gnaw. And how! The lyrics, which were abstract even in his previous bands, he has “dumbed down” to a bizarre minimalism, and across the record they work as a prosthetic aid, a seasoning. Gnaw really are a different story.
I don’t know how the hell they twiddled all the auxiliary knobs in the studio, but such a brilliant trick for making dirty music, a literally supremely ugly album, is something few others could come up with. As my colleague Rok Podgrajšek once said on a similar occasion: “This music is so ugly that it’s actually beautiful!” That definitely goes for Gnaw too.
Gnaw are breaking new ground in the extreme music sphere. Everything is subordinated to the creation of extreme noise, to the loyalty of unmelodic, half-step-tuned riffs that carry the rhythm all by themselves, a rolling, musty doom groove. Alongside it, the sound samples of a circular saw’s shriek cut in, coming, of course, from the guitar. Picture a man in a straitjacket, locked in a 1.00m x 1.00m cell, a gas mask on his head, constantly slamming his head into the left and right walls. There’s no worse nightmare. And one more thing. The word progressive is entirely fitting here. The music is toxically experimental. And that’s not all. Listening to the album, it feels like it was played live, in the first half hour of a basement rehearsal, purely for the fun of it. The players switched off their train of thought and surrendered to feeling. What those feelings are like, the paragraphs above describe. If you focus only on the individual building blocks of Gnaw’s music, you find that each one plays (and sings, in the case of vocals) its own totally separate groove. But when you put it all together, the whole picture and idea snap into coherence.
Take the track Watcher, for example, which stands out on the album and “calms” it down. The deliberately “botched” clean vocals with a hollow Ozzy accent are surrounded here by the lashing of simple stormy effects, like a malicious gust of wind, unleashed through the guitar. Really just tricks of minimalism, which burn in their own peculiar way. This is the track on the album that comes closest to ears used to conventional music.
Gnaw shock with their experiment. They unleash so much noise, so much atmosphere of self-destruction and horror, that today’s conventionally minded bands, the ones coming out of genres devoted to cookie monster vocals and riff hyperplasia, can’t even dream of it. Shar is the album’s peak. Hypnotic rhythms, with the occasional killing vocal eating its way in (“vokills” is the band’s label in the booklet credits, where “vocals” are concerned) and a veil of mildly synthesized guitar longing.
Gnaw drag along a completely unique musical character! It’s hard to dissect in any simple way. But it’s something. It’s adventurous, progressive, exploratory, and, being the first on the planet, also independent. If we have a label for indie rock, there’s no damn reason we couldn’t use the word “indie” for indie metal too! The album “This Face” won’t be bearable for those who come home drained from the calvary of an eight-hour workday, unless they make a living analytically studying music like Gnaw’s. It’ll be interesting for everyone looking for the bizarre, the eccentric, the shocking, the daring, and music that constantly experiments and spontaneously self-generates ideas. “This Face” is an extremely unpredictable and provocative album. But it’s a beginning. We’ll see whether it turns out in the future to be a failed experiment, or whether the current feeling of total chaos can be honed into even greater sense. It’s a balancing act. How much abstraction to offer at the expense of sense. How much of it the masses can consume, and at what point they declare you an absolute lunatic. And in the end. Whether it’s all just a gamble and a bluff by spoiled boys full of themselves, with the basic aim of drawing attention to themselves, or really an honest courage of exploration in musical art. Let’s wait and see.
Lineup
Alan Dubin – vocals
Jun Mizumachi – guitar
Jamie “The Bog†Sykes – percussion
Carter Thornton – keyboards, effects, programming
Brian Beatrice – effects
Tracklist
1. Haven Vault
2. Vacant
3. Talking Mirrors
4. Feelers
5. Backyard Frontier
6. Watcher
7. Ghosted
8. Shard
9. BYF (Reprise)
