In the sweaty recesses of punk and hardcore, friendly competition can yield the greatest narrative for an upcoming release. Make no mistake about it, music is not a sport. Band tees are not hockey jerseys (unless they are) and year end rankings and awards are all made up constructs like time, man. But when fans look at some of the most dissected split releases in these genres, we can always insert the moment when one band says “good game” to the other when we know they don’t fuckin’ mean it. The most classic example is perhaps the legendary The Faith / Void split from 1982. No one announced that the two bands were going head to head from Side A to B, but we all know that Void used their 15 minutes like a 360 degree slam from the foul line.
So let’s take a look at the new split single from young San Jose hardcore heroes in the making: Sunami and Gulch.
The rules were set in advance. The digital release was given a 7-inch length with each band getting one “side” and roughly 6 minutes and two songs to make their statement. For the sake of this review, first up is Sunami.
The more classic early 2000s style throwdown band of the two, the songs that Sunami offer up on this split windmill kick you through your headphones. Putting the two titles together — “Step Up” and “Die Slow” — almost seems deliberate as the bands slow chugging molasses riffs bleed pummel in locking grooves. “Die Slow,” the more dynamic of the two tracks, includes a spoken word interlude from Tupac Shakur’s character in Juice before heading back into the song’s double-bass drum midtempo assault with lead singer Josef Alfonso taking no prisoners.
Next comes Gulch with their two tracks, “Bolt Swallower” and “Accelerator.” Even though the word “Gulch” relates to a downward incline for water to rush down, it’s a lot more fun and fitting for the band’s music to think of it as a phonetic personification of the sound they are able to create. This band bubbles with more ferocity than a hungry boar high on amphetamines. At four-minutes, “Bolt Swallower” practically feels like proggy journey by hardcore standards as the band opens with slow bludgeon with singer Elliot Morrow curdling blood with his guttural growl. At the halfway mark the band kicks up the pace before slowing way down into a clean guitar outro that is downright beautiful. Next, “Accelerator” lives up to its title as the song makes up for any of the speed lost on the past three songs by both bands. And in under two minutes of power-violence bliss, it’s gone before you tell your boss to go “kick rocks.”
So who won the hardcore arms race between Sunami and Gulch? Who really cares? With 12 minutes of pitch-perfect hardcore, there are no losers.
Prerequisites: Gulch’s Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress and Sunami’s Sunami.
Essential Tracks: “Die Slow” and “Bolt Swallower”