Kaleidoscopic effects and vintage lingerie wrestling. [SG]
Let’s get a sweat on…
Scotland’s Gastric Band is not for the faint-hearted and we here at Armellodie Records are proud to be releasing their debut album, Party Feel on Monday 3rd June 2013. Get wise to this serious noise dear fellows and fellettes.
Party Feel is joyfully peculiar, and Gastric Band is set to turn the world on its ear. The song-writing is dynamic, and the music is rich and diverse. Even at its dirtiest, heaviest points the hooks are memorable and the music is abundant with melody.
Bruce Wallace (Guitar, Synth, Loops), Cameron Cullen (Guitar, Samples, Keys, Loops), Jack Weir (Guitar) and Ross MacPherson (Drums, Percussion) formed Gastric Band in Edinburgh at the beginning of 2011. Bruce just happens to be the founding member of similarly off-kilter spazz-jazz rockers Super Adventure Club.
That four-piece soon blossomed into five with the addition of Ricki Thomson (Drums, Percussion) joining in 2012.
Citing the likes of Steve Reich, Robert Fripp, and Bill Bruford as influences, Gastric Band channel the taboo-breaking spirits of Frank Zappa and Karlheinz Stockhausen into their music. There's no time to get settled, no time to relax and no time to wonder what it all means as melody butts heads with rhythm through unexpected arrangements.
Opening with the vaguely lounge-core noodlings of ‘It’s Good But It’s Not Right’, jouncing from B52s/Talking Heads post-punk guitar to electro pop to avant-rock within the confines of six minutes.
‘Dustin Binman’ sees the quintet launch forth a gut-tightening onslaught of progrock-chamberjazz-electronica that paints a mind vision of Nels Cline and Autechre jamming soundtracks to futuristic underwater movies. It makes for one hell of an exciting listen, set to fry your mind faster than you can say, “ring modulation”.
‘Brad Shitt’ and ‘Sexy Grandad’ wreak more aural havoc and the tech-heads out there are sure to be floored by the blistering, top-shelf guitar work. Free-jazz aficionados and jam-band acolytes will be drawn in by the free-form sonic exploration. These tracks are intense, original, and anarchic with a bloody-minded coherence of purpose.
Album closer, ‘Under a Glass Table’ is the most subtle song, and perhaps the album’s pièce de résistance, with effortless innovation and musical destruction sharing the stage with childlike wonder at the oddness of the world.
Gastric Band is operating with one freakish mind, like a drug-addled 5-headed Cerberus of rock and roll. The five schizophrenic grooves that make up Party Feel provide a lasting warped cuddliness, an intoxicating and fearful mix of intricacy, subtlety, brutality, flippancy, and seriousness. Each song burrows its way under your skin and fires electrical impulses down the axons of your nervous system.
You will surrender. You will submit. You will shake your whole, entire body.
