by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
Gouge Away formed with the intention to do a show and an EP, so in a sense, everything they’ve done that’s gone further than that has been bonus time. It’s part of what’s made every LP from them so welcome — you want the good bands to stick around as long as possible, and Gouge Away keep delivering. While , Dies saw the band wear their politics on their sleeve in their attempt to make a big communal tent for whoever needed it, Burnt Sugar turned inwards, the band trading in some velocity for churning grooves, catchy dissonance, and a more dynamic approach to aggression. Deep Sage brings these approaches together, dealing with the push-pull of demanding domestic and creative lives. The album is post-hardcore in the classic sense, a more thoughtful response to what you did immediately before, less of a departure than a deepening of what Gouge Away had established on Burnt Sugar. The band is looser, more free, but no less intense than they had been before, just resoundingly confident in their penchant for sour, angular melodies.
Gouge Away has introduced subtle but sharp changes to their sound with each release, but what’s remained identifiable from the beginning are the guitar’s wiry, ugly riffing; even for (post-)hardcore, the band luxuriates in dissonance and tension, and the resolution often doesn’t come from dispelling that tension as it does from catharsis when the tension rises exponentially. The title track “Deep Sage” exemplifies this best, the vocals moving through the music with dexterity and purpose, changing flows and cadences in unexpected places, evoking enjambment in poetry or a rapper’s intuitive sense of wordplay in equal measure. Instrumentally, the band opts for subtlety to flex their growing prowess; right away, the ground shifts underneath you when the band starts “Stuck in a Dream” in 4/4, the drums quite literally emphasizing every beat, only for a noisy turnaround to take the band into playing a similar sequence in 3/4. That transition emphasizes the sharpness of the melody and culminates in a fitful outro as the vocals get dreamier and dreamier against the band’s aggression. The band employs a similar move for “A Welcome Change,” though it leans harder into psychedelia by repeating a guitar figure that gives the song the quality of a skipping record until the song transforms into a display of restlessness. It’s these sorts of tricky approaches to composition that makes this such a breathless experience: repetition is married to rhythmic ingenuity so seamlessly that by the time you’ve noticed something happening, the band changes it into something a little different than before.
There’s a thread of tension between domestic life and the life of an artist running through the record, with much of Deep Sage dealing with the specifics of motivation: why continue being in a band when it does so much to stunt the rest of your life around it? Why live life when you can take the band on the road and escape? This collision happens most explicitly on “Maybe Blue,” a moody, angular track where the guitars trace minimal melodies punctuated by call and response stabs. The signifiers of domestic life have gone sour — dead plants, unkempt hair, spoiled food — and the sense memories of being an artist, even the hardships, are distant enough to offer a tantalizing escape. It satisfies with a quiet-loud approach, but reaches excellence for the way Thomas Cantwell is able to support the groove in the quietest moments, changing the subdivisions so that no section is played quite the same.
The lyrical style on this record strikes a balance between being direct and fixating so closely on a small part of the image that the lyrics cross over into being oblique meditations; part of what sells this balance is the way Christina Michelle can sound like she’s white-knuckling through the private moments of life, seeing larger than life stakes in keeping the houseplants alive (“Overwatering”) and feeling like the world really has flipped when you’re doubled over in the middle of a panic attack (“A Welcome Change”). One of the most consistently striking aspects of the record is the use of repetition; Michelle, in expressing the most minute details of rage with her voice, is able to keep changing the melodies and deliveries of her lyrics without it feeling contrived or messy — every layer reveals a new depth. They’ve always been more keenly aware of dynamics than other bands in their scene, and in retaining a structural simplicity, the band has given themselves space to display their cultivated chemistry and musicianship.
The band aren’t shy about their influences — the bass specifically brings to mind the pummeling low end provided by Vern Rumsey from Unwound, and the intensity of the vocals make Gouge Away sound like a lost Gravity or Ebullition Records band. They emphasize aggression by punctuating those moments with restraint that sounds genuinely taxing to maintain, and it’s a cathartic relief when the band leans into bursts of energy with no plans to step on the brakes. The vocals are the thing to break the dissonant tension most often. Michelle scorches her voice over In Utero-style riffs on “The Sharpening” and turns this same energy towards hooks on the excellent “Spaced Out,” but it’s the newer flourishes that leave the strongest impressions; the way she croons through some of the crucial moments of “Newtau” are so unadorned and direct in its softness that it feels like a natural partner to her more established, screamed delivery.
“Dallas,” the closing track, makes full use of this cultivated vulnerability and the band goes out on fuzzed out, restrained guitars floating atop the rhythm section while the bends in the lead keep rising like a siren for the first half. It’s the second half of the song, when it climaxes with a heavier march from the rhythm section and a vocal melody that reaches as far as it can for resolution, that puts us closest to the tension between what’s needed to be fully present in your life and the hostile walls of daily routine. It’s the most literary of the lyrics here, the characters still shadowy but the stakes higher. The scene narrated is the kind you can imagine happening at any holiday or family event: step away to collect yourself, take the prescribed (but not necessarily to you) benzo of choice, and wait for the world to slide back into place.
Deep Sage grapples with what’s on the other side of being in a punk band once the uncertainty fades — the effort that goes into maintaining your life without a creative outlet, disconnected from your loved ones and your home while being physically present, and finding how to bring a creative outlet into your life without letting it swallow everything around it. When a band makes a “mature” record, it usually means a mellowing out, a sign of confidence in their position, and an exorcising of idiosyncrasies. With Gouge Away, it means almost the reverse. Despite the ups and downs of being in a band, they’ve carved a space where they can lean into their impulses without fear or care of alienating an audience and came out with their most urgent, affecting record in the process.