GASP

Tour was great (let's be honest - it usually is), Western Canada was breathtaking, and the last month  of traveling has been superb. The United States of America is a terrifying place, and hardcore is just as fierce and ugly as it always has been....

To an outlier and/or outsider like myself, GASP never seemed to fit in. I wasn't hip to the inner workings and scene dynamics of the desperate hardcore that was coming out of Southern California in the '90s, and the connections that would create Power Violence were a world away from my reality at the time, even as I marveled at CROSSED OUT and CAPITALIST CASUALTIES and MITB, wondering what the fukk these people were doing (and what they were on). Though GASP seemed almost like they were a part of that world, to me they sounded like BUZZOV•EN and DYSTOPIA...but more psychedelic - and with blast beats. I would have had no clue while I listened to 1998's Drome Triler Of Puzzle Zoo People over and over, and I perhaps wouldn't even have cared. But I listened like a motherfukkr, and all of GASP's recordings hold up today as a pleading and ferocious document. Judging from the manifestation of their current form last fall at the Power Violence Project show in Oakland, two decades have done nothing to mellow GASP and my first live exposure was (thankfully) more than I could have expected. This is pure devastation - listen to the vocals during the slow parts of "Silver And Shiver When Troubled" and ask yourself what is happening to us: I'm ok, I'm ok, I'm fucking ok...so leave me here. 

SORE FOR DAYS