Gawthrop – Kuboa (Wretched Sludge Doom)
Honestly I was not a fan of this at first. South Korea’s Gawthrop dilutes industrial death and noise into a stark, super-pressurized form of sludge doom that’s so absolutely wretched it will likely remind you of the drudgery that is your life. The compressed sound held me back, at first, until I really listened to what they were doing instead of letting it flow through my ears. That is, I needed to let the brain in-between process what was going on, because just dropping of FYO name wasn’t going to cut it. Kuboa is the band’s first full-length after some demos, splits, and a comp, representing their development into a burden on life itself. The more I listened, the more I picked up on the tactile qualities of Gawthrop. The thudding, grainy murk they present is bruising to the soul, but not gratuitously. There’s little comfort to be found here as they toss you into a maintenance shaft of droning sludge, with flickers of melody like exposed wires giving brief senses of space during your quick descent.
Kuboa’s track set tells a story, or at least I read it as such. The opening stretch is like state of catalepsy and from there, a series of hallucinatory collections of pulsing feedback, sooty ambience, and a vice-like dread. Strangely what seems a consistent whole is actually separate vignettes that stand like moments of darkness along a tree-lined highway. Hazard lights blink out of the gloom from brief moments, leaving you alone and meaningless; this is truly a reminder of all the bad things we try to hide. Even the vocals have their own bizarre texture, making a metaphor out of post-modern industrial development with human remains smeared across rusted steel. Kuboa does that, see, and only gains further control over the listener the more you give it permission to do so. What first seemed a mindless dip into heavy-handed sludge leaves you, rather, the mindless one; numb and absolutely wrecked.
Written by Stanley, Devourer of Souls
Gawthrop – Kuboa
Sentient Ruin Laboratories
Cover Art: MA
4.5 / 5
