With so many fatalistic predictions proclaimed about rock over decades and decades of revisions, ruminations and hauntings, it is curious to realize that, even though it never died, there is a certain revival of spirit around the genre today, to which the passage of time after the pandemic isolation is not immune? The cyclical nature of this non-future brings a permanence to the present that, by looking at what has already been done, finds ways to survive and, more importantly, to affirm its urgency in these times. With all due distance, starting from the more or less remote genealogy of wide-eyed hardcore, the path blazed by SST or Dischord, and which has bravely spread to other fronts in spirit and ethics right up to the present day, we can think of names like Mannequin Pussy or Gel as an inspiring front of attack capable of dragging the most diverse hordes of people into the mosh pit in electrified communion. And there we can also find Gouge Away.
Named after the final loop of ‘Doolitle’, it’s undeniable to think of the influence of the Pixies on Gouge Away’s music, but that’s a somewhat redundant exercise for the Dantesque spectrum of songs that have come to life under the aura of the Boston quartet. The balance between fury and delicacy, the vertigo of the abyss and the eternal suspension of the songs marked there has already undergone so many mutations that it comes to this Florida quintet as a mere vestige for a creased music, siphoned of the most essential strains and expelled with the belief of those who live them intensely and now. ‘Deep Sage’, the band’s third album, released last year by Deathwish Inc. after a hiatus of almost five years, continues in the vein of 2018’s ‘Burnt Sugar’ but better translates that same belief in the songs through more incisive arrangements and greater dynamics, capable of releasing breaths of noise, new revelations. Echoes of Unwound, Team Dresch, Nü Sensae or the less bootylicious primer of Amphetamine Reptile hover here, but never as a nostalgic portal. Led by Christina Michelle’s assertive voice and lyrics, between lacinating screams – the title theme or the anguished ending of ‘The Sharpening’ -, melodies of greater candor – Dallas – and that half hallucinatory pose – Overwatering -, the beasts of ‘Deep Sage’ contemplate intemperate moments thrown at the jugular and dissonant passages in tension on the same wavelength that leaves a memory, with the barrage of guitars anchored in the rhythmic precision of the bass and drums, in search of collective catharsis, over and over again. Because that’s what it takes. BS
