by Myles Tiessen
Gloin’s latest album, All of your anger is actually shame (and I bet that makes you angry), is the sound of frustration and apathy. Not only does the album title adroitly communicate the cyclical demise of unavoidable frustration of spiral thought, but the songs themselves—noisy, harsh, unrelenting in their acrimony pack each song with cool detachment.
At least in how Gloin handles it here on their sophomore full-length, apathy has never sounded so good. All of your anger is packed with a beautiful barrage of industrial back-beats, Adderall-addicted bass lines, and so much grizzled shouting from dual vocalists John Watson and Vic Byers that you can almost taste the blood dripping from their windpipes.
With three years since their debut LP, We Found This, the 12 tracks on this new record feel wholly distinct. Where every rock critic’s favourite word, “angular,” was painted all over that first record, it’s exciting to see that All of your anger transcended that categorization, instead opting for a path with no map.
From the first haunting synthetic notes on “20 Bucks” to the final disembodied howl of “Big Boss,” the record meanders through almost all subgenres of post-punk and noise rock.
The Nine Inch Nails industrial drum machine on “Salamander” working in distorted harmony with the abrasive noise of a messing with some instrument’s input jack are the sounds you hear bouncing off the concrete walls and up the cigarette-covered stairs of an underground cyberpunk club. Or maybe it’s just the sci-fi-sounding laser beams near the end of the song that give it that feeling.
Whether the band is raging through utter despondency on “Horse Fighting,” where Byers barks, “Left alone again/ No future in sight/ Never needed a friend,” or crafting the perfect surfer-goth track “Bucket of Blood,” All of your anger is unrelenting in its urgency.
The fiery “controlfreak69” is perhaps the best example of that desperation. With the nonstop 4/4 drumming and a thick diesel exhaust bass line, the typhoon of both electronic and organic sound throughout the track is simultaneously hypnotic and distressing.
The song explores—you guessed it—control in a way that feels so limited in its consequences that it taps into a more realistic depiction of rule and force. Control doesn’t just mean domination; Gloin sees it through self-depreciation of one’s willpower. A good day is classified by simply being able to go to work, and later, when the grip on their day is slipping, Watson screams, “Lines are blurred/ Vision blurring/ But I keep it tight/ Cause I don’t wanna lose.”
All your anger is a stroke of panic and destruction. But Gloin, like all great contemporary noise rock groups, turns that into something sensational.