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So we did Thanksgiving yesterday at my job, and it resulted in the entire building taking a 2 hour lunch, followed by overstuffed lethargy that carried over into most of today. Therefore I didn’t actually get around to posting yesterday, I only had the necessary brain power to do my actual job, not this one too. But here we are, a day later, and everything is fine.

So why not go with an easy one?

Gauze - Equalizing Distort is a sure bet if you like fast hardcore. I mean maybe there’s still a few people out there who wanna get all weird about listening to good music from not-America, but we don’t bug out about that around here, we just assume they were in Rain On The Parade or some such shit.

Anyway, for some people Equalizing Distort is THE Gauze album. I don’t think you can really declare one better than the rest with a band like this. They’ve existed for almost 30 years and played extremely uncompromising hardcore for the entire time, though they’ve only had 5 proper albums, and a few compilation appearances. But one thing that has to be noted is this is really the proper beginning of the Gauze sound. The starting point here is Discharge, and on early recordings they were truer to that style, but there’s a huge emphasis on a kind of herk and jerk starting and stopping that frankly the boys from Stoke-on-Trent wouldn’t have been able to manage in their heyday. This kind of rapidfire on-off-on-off-on approach to seemingly simple hardcore riffs serves, quite well to disorient the listener and really get your head spinning. People frequently site this fact about Gauze that they are trying to sound fast without actually playing at a high number of beats per minute. To give replicate the feeling of speed and movement. It’s interesting because, after music gets to a certain speed, like say in grindcore, the relentless pounding becomes almost static and unmoving again. So rather than just blast it out, Gauze keeps things at a decent mid-paced to moderately fast clip but with a constant shifting of the gears.  It’s something hard to put into words, but when you hear the pounding churn of opener and all time classic, Pressing On it just sort of crystallizes. The riffs ascend and descend back and forth while the drums are constantly rolling from snare to toms and back again. It’s a constant feeling of disharmony and chaos. With each recording subsequent to this, Gauze increased this tension in their music, building on top of everything they’d done the time before, but this is for all intents, the starting point.