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This self-described "garage band" from McAllen, Texas showed up on my radar earlier this year and comprehensively smashed my skull into fragments. Looking back at the Youtube upload that the band did for their debut Noumenal Field Recordings EP (released online at the very end of 2022), I had commented the following: "...holy fucking shit, is this awesome.
Like someone crammed early Sore Throat, Harry Pussy, and The Stooges into a malfunctioning Cuisinart. I'm in heaven .". You know what? I'm still in heaven.
Sink your teeth into this hunk of rotted meat. The Noumenal Field Recordings EP hits physical media for the first time here, paired with the previously unreleased Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) EP, and both sides of this machine will fuck you right up. Just like I spewed all over that video comment section months ago, Noumenal Field Recordings rips through eleven songs of blown-out aggression that effortlessly walk the line between classic early 80s three-chord hardcore and heavy doses of Brainbombs / GG Allin - level sludge-punk barbarity that you can smell from here. Onto that feral sonic assault, the band wields feedback-screaming slabs of freeform noise rock in the Harry Pussy vein, blurts of brain-damaged Casio weirdness, obnoxiously catchy hooks, and barbs of clotted noisecore that hit and run faster than you can even try to catch the plates. This shit is no joke, even when it sounds like the band is having an absolute blast. That first EP is so ugly, so mangled, so fucked up, and yet so weirdly literate, with nods to Nick Land, Marx and Thoreau. The lyrics are fantastic, too. Which is doubly confusional since it seems that these songs were written on the spot, recorded live and apparently totally off-the-cuff and improvised in that aforementioned McAllen garage. Blows me away.
And that B-side Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) is even weirder and more scathing. More shit-fi droning HC and shreiking, bloodthirsty vocals collide with bizarre backing roars and inexplicable noise, sampled speeches giving way to boombox-grade ur-punk, every riff and every bass note sounding like it'll give you tetanus if you scratch yourself on 'em, the drumming weirdly mixed with an echoing effect (perhaps simply due to the utterly and awesomely atrocious recording approach. Fleeting moments of lobotomized thrash break apart against shrill noisecore that goes so hard at 1,000 mile per hour velocity that it all turns into a delicious mush, only for another one of Gasket's wickedly catchy hooks to stumble out of the carnage. That side culminates with the unholy power electronics / improvised destruction of "Hole In The Head", a previously stand-alone track from Gasket that I begged them to include on this slab. Like I said, I'm in fuckin' heaven...
The Noumenal Field Recordings / Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) cassette comes in kraft-brown j-cards befitting the look of the original digital uploads, issued in a limited edition of 100 copies.
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