Gasp - Ghost In Scow Out

Label: self released
Year: 2017

File this one under: Never Thought I'd Be Listening To A New Gasp Record...Now If Only They Would Mount A Tour With Noothgrush (probably won't fit on one of those plastic record dividers, so abbreviate as space dictates).
I'm pretty sure (but am well documented to have been wrong on at least four [possibly five] occasions) that I reviewed the Gasp demo "Sore For Days" the summer I was living in Isla Vista and writing reviews for Heartattack fanzine. I'm pretty sure. I definitely still have the cassette in my possession, and recall writing it up that summer.
What's definitely for sure is that a couple summers later when their first album came out "Drome Triler Of Puzzle Zoo People" (which still scores in the top ten when ranking worst titled records that I own), I wore the thing out. The absolute weirdness that Gasp manages to combine into a cohesive and, most importantly, highly listenable package is difficult to convey. To just say, "yeah, they are that fucked up psychedelic power violence trip", is not doing them justice. Sure, it's kinda right, but Gasp are more than the sum of their parts. They were fucked up, but they in turn fucked you up.
The bulldozing sludge and scattershot grind are in the way backseat here on these two songs. Long ass songs, mind you. There isn't any of the lo-fi scraping hardcore of the demo here.The hazy noise treatment of both the instrumentation and song structure itself, is what holds the often conflicting elemental fragments together, and run them through an oscillating flange of cosmic debris. Hallucinatory music for deviant explorers. Start listening, and next thing you know twenty minutes just went by and there you sit, no worse for the wear, but the floor hasn't swept itself.

Very happy to hear Gasp in the year 2018, a solid 22 years since I'm pretty sure I wrote that demo review.

DL