I'm supposing anyone who's read even a couple lines about this Arkansas-born, Olympia-based trio must know that their not-so-secret weapon is 22-year-old front-woman Beth Ditto, whose blistering, blues-reeling yowl has established some goddamn fully realized roots for the band's punk-inflected garage rock. It's Ditto who pushes the Gossip above the majority of their genre's not-so-great, middling pretenders. You need go no further than "Nite", the grinding opener on their second full-length Movement, to realize these shaggy, Ramones-loving stylistics are channel surfing Etta James, Janis Joplin, Bessie Smith, and dusty country roads-- not Nina Hagen, like so much of the pack. Ozark garage rock! Queer-positive Leadbelly!
My adoration isx92t unadulterated. I do indeed like dirty, swaggering music, but beyond Ditto's substantial vocal prowess, the band doesn't often push the artistic envelope. I'm not stubbornly naïve enough to think every band needs to pull out the analog tape-loop machine and KK Null back catalogue, but when these guys opt to compliment Ditto's voice by swerving left and experimenting with their relatively bare instrumentation, the off-kilter results raise the band's output to a different level of sweet-home goodness. Conversely, when they stick hard and fast to standard formations, these enfant terribles lose steam and dissolve inertly into to the white-striped background.
I grew up wearing a Royal Trux t-shirt and playing drums in a shaky teenage band that covered Flipper's "Sex Bomb". Ever since I was that high-school chump with a confused head for taking apart instruments, I knew half the battle with my beloved genre was overcoming similarity. The essential aspect of seminal noise-fuck bands like Pussy Galore and Royal Trux was a preternatural ability to incorporate punk and art-rock into standard 1960's garage and a lifetime of cribbed rhythm and blues. Sadly, at this point, even one side of Dial M For Motherfucker or Twin Infinitives still out-punches the entire oeuvres of so many of today's well-dressed hacks.
I'm blabbering about composition because the cracks in the Gossip's straightforward sheen point toward a previously unseen horizon splattered orange, pink, and dark purple. What if they upped their already substantial ante by making their work more patchwork? Ditto's vocal acrobatics tank when the music behind her doesn't progress from Olympia style bass-less guitar mush backed by primitive drums. When you rely on one guitar you should take a nod from Mecca Normal: develop a mile-high stack of riffs. As of now, I'm left picking at guitar god scraps.
Movement's best moments are transitions: the slice of guitar noise at the end of the beautifully distraught "Yesterday's News"; "Gone" becomes an unaccompanied hand-clap sing-a-long at its coda, transforming the track into a wonderfully anonymous punk-rock spiritual; after a pause at the end of "Light Light Sleep", a repetitive guitar chops it up, and Ditto's notes explode, taking flight. Though there are only a few of these shifts in recording textures and gradations, these glitches in tonal quality impart a beautiful dissymmetry to the sermon, adding a muddy Tower Recordings underbelly to the band's approach.
The Gossip sound best when flowing through lo-fi constraints: when they dox92t have a hi-hat, and the down-tuned guitar is missing string. When the music's boxier, Ditto's voice soars; when the guitar and bass evoke a boom-box recording, the muck of the dank room warps into a golden treasure trove. In the spirit of shitty recordings, I look forward to their upcoming live release on Dim Mak, which was culled from Non-Dead In NYC (a cassette the band ran only 50 copies of themselves). Maybe they could use that raw tape hiss and a razor blade to create a complexly recalibrated remix album?
Whatever. Even if my experimental pipe dream doesx92t come to fruition, I really like it when people make music out of junk, and the Gossip do indeed concoct boozy sun-drunk music, its rust mined from anthills, rising rivers, dirty lemonade, and the brassy patches of grass in a broken southern sidewalk. I just wish the soul was as fractured.
