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Oct 16, 2024

EP REVIEW: Gasket - ‘Babylon’ | The Soundboard

Why say the old school is better than the new one when you can have both? While jokingly bringing up that Old El Paso ¿y porqué no los dos? meme, there’s something so admirable about more ancient

Why say the old school is better than the new one when you can have both? While jokingly bringing up that Old El Paso ¿y porqué no los dos? meme, there’s something so admirable about more ancient artefacts being resurfaced and given new life. That’s how it feels with Baltimore’s latest young upstarts Gasket who, with only two EPs to their name (as Bandcamp dictates), are bringing back some gross sounding dirge and crunch from metal’s elder underground to the thronging hardcore space of 2024.

This latest of the releases, Babylon, is in the quartet’s words “a culmination of all of our favourite bands”, and they’re certainly borrowing from the whole field of metalcore, beatdown, black metal, crust punk and even a peppering of grind. It’s a collection that’s down and dirty, fuelled by rage, played on Hetfield-like Flying Vs, and encapsulated in a cover of skeletons getting guillotined—another throwback to the kind of cheaply printed relics that look remarkably sick, enough to make the general public feel queasy.

Gulch were known for that rare Etsy-reseller merch a few years ago, and Gasket’s noise sometimes sounds alike. The jangly black metal tremolo leads the Bay Area band chose to lean on opens the EP; Guillotine’s a thunderous sub-two minute chug-fest that transforms into a galloping show horse, a keystone for the ‘try not to headbang to this’ video challenges. When it locks into that horsey groove, it straightens itself out, then returns. Not a second is wasted where a new rhythmic section could be introduced across the board, in fact. But while other bands could botch it, that’s not the case here; Babylon maintains a catchiness all of its own in some sort of up and down staircase riff, and Acolyte plays around with chord sequences as a slam band or a deathened one.

Often it’s the lake-depth plummeting bass riffs join up the dots in many instances, as on Syndicate, a song about an ex-hero you wish you’ve never met rounded up aptly with the refrain “I will see you in hell!”. It’s the longest track here and the band’s most conventional—in a whopping two and a half minutes!—yet never holding back on the venom. Vocalist Flynn Joseph Zimmer sounds genuinely pissed in a mid-range shriek that’s neither chalkboard high or troll-level lows, a Baby Bear option for a band that duly balances hardcore throwdowns and fast-paced circle pits. In that vein (and with a wonderful “you’re nothing but a thorn in my fucking side!” line) closer Penance delightfully pushes the vocals slightly behind a thronging wall of noises, cuts out, and rounds out the throttling proceedings with a final beatdown boss payoff. Oh yes.

As a companion piece to 2023’s Dull The Needle introduction, Gasket are already finding themselves in great company. Released through Blue Grape Music, a Roadrunner offshoot home to Code Orange and Spiritual Cramp, this Baltimore troupe captures the highlights from a bunch of scene-stealers and packages them so tightly into a short space that it’s electrifying. And with some grotty production (crispy enough, but less polished than a lot of modern hardcore), this short release feels like a stinky over-bubbling sourdough starter. You can imagine Gasket’s HxC festival billings coming thick and fast, and those will be twenty-minute sets that could look to end even the gnarliest of gig-goers.

For fans of: Gulch, Volcano, END

‘Babylon’ by Gasket is released on 21st June on Blue Grape Music.

Words by Luke Nuttall