Sunami and Gulch, two band’s whose respective members constitute a vital component of the rising hardcore-crossover, Santa Cruz to San Jose pipeline of aggression, have put aside their differences and issues a new split 7″ via Triple B Records. It’s almost as good of surprise as your parents announcing that they’re getting back together. But since that’s probably not going to happen, you’ll just have to settle for rocking out to this split.
Sunami cracks the seal and unleashes the pent-up pressure of a thousand dreams deferred, keeping in line with their self-titled EP from mid-2020 with death metal-inspired grooves and a sheer swagger hardcore bravado. There are a lot of bands out there looking to deliver a beat-down to your senses, but Sunami are really able to bring it with crushing authority, wave-after-concussive-wave, with enough invigorating energy to still leave you thirsty for more, even though they just left you drowned in excess, extremity, and egregious mental affliction.
Gulch offers their take on crossover death metal on the savage, latter half of the 7″. There really isn’t a band, contemporary or otherwise, that you can compare Gultch to capture the dynamic sense for loose, swelling grooves that have a familiarity to them that serves to illustrate their strangeness further. There is a searching quality to their compositions, that despite their directness, leaves me feeling like that band are merely at the Proterozoic stages of their evolutionary development. The yearning, straining yawp singer emits on closer Elliot Morrow “Accelerator” is reminiscent at times of the spiritually shaken shrieks Bryan Funck of Thou can emit, and the spindly, ballad-drawing guitar and harp pairing at the end of the otherwise Fuming Mouth-esque grind-and-pummel of “Bolt Swallower” feels more appropriate as the outro for a track off a Norwegian-inspired, solo black-metal project than any with Terror DNA in its genome.
You can stream the entirety of this bloody good brawler below via Bandcamp:
If you want a copy of this bad boy on vinyl, you can get it from Triple B Records. They no breaks on folks enthusiasm for this record and a lot of variants are already sold out. If you want one, act fast!
