Gulch - Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress ALBUM REVIEW
California band dishes up a sixteen minute cornucopia of metal/punk debauchery
What are we to make of this album? Is it even an album? What is that artwork and why can’t I stop staring at it? Let’s focus on what we know: this is 8 short tracks of neck-breaking metalcore, overflowing with quality.
Despite the record’s daunting title, I wouldn’t necessarily call it “impenetrable,” nor particularly “cerebral.” Utterly relentless in its pacing? Yes. Sonically and thematically unforgiving? Also yes. Feral in its performances? Yes x3. But we’re used to albums like that. I’d say despite its aesthetics, Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress offers us just the right level of accessibility to make it a fun and rewarding listen. Take the opener, the title track. Once the pulverising drum fills, blastbeats, sickening riffs and animalistic shrieks are out of the way, it’s deceptively groovy. The rhythms of the track channel punk effortlessly, but the riffs, the vocals and the production are as metal as you can get.
We see the same thing on ‘Self Inflicted Mental Terror.’ The guitar intro is just pure fucking metal. It blends so well with the ferocious punk delivery of the verses. The chorus(?) around two thirds into the track is the best of all. The band maintains a breathless energy level, whilst constantly playing with the textures and tempos of each track.
We see the same variation in ‘Cries of Pleasure, Heavenly Pain.’ We get D-beats, double kick blastbeats, as well as a kind of marching rhythm that comes and goes throughout its 1:57 run. What Gulch are doing on this album is not so much a blend of styles between punk and metal, but rather finding a disgusting sweet spot where the two overlap. The lyrics deal in carnal sin, a lust that is base and beautiful at the same time, a Garden of Earthly Delights. It is a particularly drum-heavy song, culminating in a percussion-only outro which fades seamlessly into the next track, but not before I start to feel my only slight gripe with the album’s production. The snare has a kind of 90s-esque clang to it that starts to become noticeable in a bad way. However, the good thing about Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress is that it gives you no time to think about such things.
In this sense, the way the band handles transitions is its greatest quality. Transitions between songs, transitions from verse to chorus to outro, transitions between passages that lean more into punk and those that lie firmly in metal. The blistering run-time of the project really works to Gulch’s advantage. Every inch of fat is stripped from the bone, there is no space to breathe, no time to trip itself up, it nails every landing.
We return to the sins of the flesh on ‘Fucking Towards Salvation,’ just past the halfway mark of the album, around the moment in the track listing where you start asking yourself what more it will continue to offer. The answer here and on ‘All Fall Down The Well’ is more amazing vocals. How many different ways can you go “EEEEEEURRRGHHHH” in sixteen minutes? You can hear every little bit of saliva in Elliot Morrow’s throat, which is great, obviously. ‘Shallow Reflective Pools of Guilt,’ the shortest of the short at 1:19, is a bit of a shrug besides some nice blast beats and more nice transitions, but these tracks just before the end are where my mind felt most in danger of wandering. But this is all relative, because even with the way attention spans are nowadays, there is not the remotest danger of wanting to turn this record off at any point.
As we finish with ‘Sin in my Heart,’ finally we can breathe. We have a less distorted guitar intro, more expansive verses, but no loss of nastiness in the album’s lyrical content. We’re condemned to “grovel at my feet. Keep it short and sweet,” and we really feel the misanthropic voice of someone who considers themselves irredeemable. It is quite dark and sobering, and the more measured pace of the song helps us to appreciate that. But then it kicks in all over again at the end, and you can’t help but smile. That’s how you know Gulch have landed something special on this album. A special combination of horror and pleasure. None of it makes any sense, but once you hear it, all you want to do it hit play again straight away.
