Gulch have reached a rarefied status in hardcore where outsiders who haven’t heard their music still might have heard things about them—frontman Elliott Morrow’s demonic intensity, or maybe the group’s now-legendary This is Hardcore 2019 set, in which they imported the gleeful, cartoonish physicality of the Santa Cruz scene to a roomful of burly East Coast punks. The band’s merch is notorious, too: their logo adorns Sanrio-themed hoodies and rugby sweaters that usually sell out within hours and fetch over $500 a pop on resale sites. None of this necessarily makes Gulch unique within hardcore, where even the best albums risk redundancy next to to the live experience. But there is no live experience of any kind right now; Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress is all Gulch have to sustain their hype in 2020, and they invest themselves in their debut like the quarantine could last the rest of their lives.
Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress isn’t meant to replicate the grim, grubby spaces where Gulch might have been playing in a simpler time. Jack Shirley’s always-sharp production removes the murk that suffused 2019 Promo (two tracks of which show up here) and allows the band’s ugly, ugly vision for hardcore to come into relief. Even if there are no pits to open the fuck up for the foreseeable future, Gulch still acknowledge the value of showmanship and scarcity—they dropped Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress with mere days of advance notice on July 24 and unintentionally provided entertaining contrast for people who find space for hardcore and folklore. For all of their fans’ superlatives like “unhinged” or “chaotic,” Gulch are very much intentional about how they present themselves: as with 2018’s Burning Desire to Draw Last Breath, Boone Naka’s strikingly beautiful and bloody art graces the cover.
On first exposure, Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress is 15 minutes of flailing limbs and demonic howls held together by centrifugal force, intended to be confirmed by two or three-word assessments of its intensity. The group is equally adept with the pure speed-freak flash of the ultra-technical Botch and Dillinger Escape Plan, the sheer ugliness of Emperor or Rotten Sound, and the antisocial populism of any given Sound and Fury headliner. Not much is intelligible, save for self-explanatory title shouts of “Lie, Deny, Sanctify” and “Cries of Pleasure, Heavenly Pain,” whose theme is more literally explored in “Fucking Towards Salvation.”
Subsequent listens reveal actual nuance and craft, words that might imply an egghead’s vision of hardcore. But even though the word “cerebral” is in the title, all such activity here is in service of intimidation and dominance. The brevity of Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress may honor hardcore’s structural rules, as Gulch understand 15 minutes is about as long as anyone should last making a scrunched face. It’s also a decision that gives specific meaning to every single blow to the skull. Gulch elevate traditional hardcore signifiers into killer hooks—on the title track, they pitch and stereo-pan feedback into a conversational melody, underscoring Morrow’s best impersonation of an overdriven amp. They throw an evil tritone over the brief militaristic pomp of “Cries of Pleasure, Heavenly Pain,” making Morrow’s howls of corporeal annihilation feel earned. They slow down and bring back their nasty riffs, thereby making them nastier. Each 90-second burst of malevolence here is a writhing, breathing being that Gulch have fully under their control.
Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress ends with a cover suggesting Gulch might have their sights set on bigger things. The closing “Sin In My Heart,” relatively epic at three and a half minutes, isn’t a particularly obscure or counterintuitive cover choice for a hardcore band. Gulch have wisely identified the Siouxsie and the Banshees song that already came equipped with a hardcore bassline and a hardcore lyric sheet (nearly half is just the title being repeated). They aren’t breaking the mold or expanding the horizons of hardcore, just providing an infusion of vitality when the genre should feel paralyzed; if the pit ever opens again, they’ll be ready when we are.
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