Gustaf

Having garnered and established a reputation already through relentless performing, touring and supporting the likes of Cage the Elephant, Omni and even No Wave doyen James Chance and Martin ‘Suicide’ Rev, and with looming dates with fuzzniks Osees and British n-Oi!-punks Idles, NYC quartet Gustaf lay down some traces to release debut album, ‘Audio Drag for Ego Slobs’.

A textural-mixture of live recordings and studio snippets reconstructed into the greater whole, the overall result is ten terse, tense, testy tracks of archly observed punk-funk, concise and precise ruminations: almost David Byrneian at times - song titles ‘Dream’, ‘Book’ and ‘Package’ could fit seamlessly onto Talking Heads’ 1979 album ‘Fear of Music’ - with a jerky kineticism that oozes out, practically pouring from the perspiring pores.

Comprised of Tine Hill (beguiling bass), Vram Kherlopian (punk-funk guitar), Melissa Lucciola (drumskinner), Tarra Thiessen (back-vocals, re-percussion), and Lydia Gammill (caught between laconic lead vocals and rocket-rhetoric) who evokes the sanguine spirit of The Flying Lizards’ Patti Palladin and the disaffected drawl of Kim Gordon.

Gustaf are (in any particular order) tight, loose (’Liquid Frown’ and ‘Happy’ are laden with laidback languor and laced with lip-smart lyricism), wiry, jagged, flailing, frantic, frenetic, hyper-energetic (‘Dream’ and ‘Cruel’ offer all the manic-mundane of XTC), repetitive, engaged (and mildly enraged) in Shangri-La-like call and response (‘The Motions’) and psychically and sonically embody the gang-mentality redolent of so many of their forebears.

Named in ironic response to the swathe of ‘cheap compilations to suit your ever-beiging moods’ ‘Audio Drag’ is the slowing down pitch-shifting voice-altering technique as favoured by Laurie Anderson (Thiessen’s grumbled distortions a background presence throughout here), ‘Ego Slobs’ a slur on those who don’t –or simply refuse to - absorb the ways and whims of the external world in the correct manner, it’s not ALL about YOU, you know?!

By the closing ‘Happy’, the question is ‘I hope you’re happy’ and ‘we hope you’re singing along’. It’s difficult not to be swayed and assuaged by such a startling debut.