Gout: Actual Bastard 
Self-Released
Out Now
Lovely bastards from North of the border release an unrelenting slab of grimy heaviness that’s enough to remove the enamel from your teeth. Inspected and certified by MK Bennett
Despite the twenty first century ideal of selling and marketing our trauma, collective and singular, and repackaging it as content, it doesn’t necessarily mean that those who only know how to turn their pain into art have less integrity. It just means it’s a little more difficult to see through the long grass. It also has a very historical context, and we are dealing here with Kafkaesque, not TikTok blipverts.
There’s a particular strain of heavy music that is definitively British, originally a sort of lo-fi grit without the polish of the American metal bands, a difference in both production values and attitude. Think of the first Napalm Death records, Bolt Thrower, or post-hardcore units like Concrete Sox or Extreme Noise Terror. Industrial level heaviness as both concept and sound.
Gout might have the most down to earth name ever, a name that requires no explanation, that sits and demands your attention. So too does their music, beautifully so. The catch and release magnificence of Inmate, its screams of despair and almost Swans-like low end that eventually crash like waves into a down tuned riff that mirrors the vocal handsomely. Barbarism begins at home and inside your head, and this breaks like walking on a fracture, horror made real. That chugging & dampened riff that kicks it off like a slow moving tank is divine. When the tempo changes, you can see the crowd at Download in your mind’s eye.
Too Bleak’s title is not as onomatopoeic as it first seems, but its feedback drenched dysphoria is as chilling as a European horror movie, the rhythmic battering acting as a bludgeon to the senses, despite the brief joy of the cowbell during the intro. Self-expression as catharsis, the squeals and pops of distortion filling your heart with an unnamed dread until you give in and turn up the volume. It is the only reasonable response. Short enough that it finishes just as you’re getting a handle on it, it hits you like dry concrete. The magnificently titled I Am A Beacon Of Health And Wellbeing deviates slightly from the metal, heading towards Thank or McClusky territory, like The Jesus Lizard playing Corrosion Of Conformity from memory. This is the single, but you wouldn’t describe it as commercial, or anywhere near the idea of it. The hooks are hidden but they are there, with a little exploration. The title may be ironic but the meaning is not lost. A potential replacement for the new national anthem, before the sickness spreads further.
Junk Sick may be a reference to William Burroughs but it once again manages to reflect its subject matter in the arrangement of the music, as a lurching bass line and Public Image guitar settle into an Idles-like swing at a grave side chant, the band ramping the fear factor way up until the heavy gothic heat spills back into itself and the sub-bass threatens to demolish the building. The whole EP is like five different bands joined together and agreed on a concept and an overall tone and then pressed record. The unremitting, unrelenting oppression of its sound is perfect, like bathing in ice and letting go, an anaesthetic, a balm to help you forget.
Tarmac is, by the parameters of the other songs, the epic. It is gloriously cinematic, the sound of a man walking towards something unspeakable. Essentially, a heavy metal take on Arab Strap via Boards Of Canada, a set closer because it would be very difficult to follow, piling tidal waves of overdriven wonder brick upon brick, it puts a full stop on a sentence but keeps the question mark in place. The way it builds is simply masterful, a drone that strikes slowly. By rights, it should be twenty minutes long; one can only hope this is rectified at their gigs and it morphs into a full-on krautrock freakout with a relevant lightshow.
It is a trip through several stages of the index of heaviness, from Damaged-era Black Flag to the feedback laced sheet metal poetry of working class lives. Not simply metal, by any stretch.
Gout’s Instagram | Linktree | Bandcamp
All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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