#gumming

 “Unpleasant” is used advisedly above. This music wants us to feel upset, it wants us to participate in the anxiety and spleen. That’s either going to work for you or not. If it does, “Sinking Ship,” the tape’s first song, may really float your boat. The bass undulates vertiginously, the guitar squeals and riffs with a rubbery snap. But Unwerth steals the show again, this time with a demented sing-song delivery: “Burn the, last bridge, last bridge / I know you want to / Strike the, last match, last match / I know you can,” with “waaant” and “caaan” stretched out and turned inside out with urgent, psychotic conviction. The drums, provided by some strange presence identified as “Lee,” bash along amiably enough at mid-tempo, until the song’s closing thirty seconds when the whole apparatus gets wound up tighter and tighter, matching Unwerth’s increasingly nutty vocal affect.  

This is punk: negative, confrontational, exciting. On occasion, something like a hook emerges from the cacophony. The bright and sparking guitar riff of “Jumpin Jumpin” suggests Devo — more so their contemporary standard bearers, Indiana’s Coneheads . But the brightness soon morphs into dread. Unwerth snarls, “This isn’t how I imagined it going.” She repeats the assertion, again and again, building to a shriek. Just as the tension gets unbearable, the song’s over. That’s what Gumming primarily offer: lyrical ugliness and musical weirdness, in concentrated ninety-second bursts. “Hank,” the last song on the tape, varies the pattern a bit. It rumbles and stumbles like a Butthole Surfers tune, c.PCPEP, and Unwerth’s performance is sort of restrained (really only sort of). It’s about being single and lonely. “The world was made for partners / But you don’t have a partner / Oh no! / Go home.” It’s hard to parse a distinction between irony and empathy in the song’s down-tuned, miasmatic swirl. But it’s a heavy feeling, on a heavy cassette. Even plastic can communicate suffering. Tell it to Devo, and turn up the Gumming.