Review Summary: A stitch in time..
Even in its golden financial age, making it to a big music label was always as much a matter of raw talent as it was luck. And so the wake of music history’s standing stones is made up of a superabundance of artists that fall through the cracks. Started by John Halvorsten in 1981 in Canterbury, New Zealand, noise rockers the Gordons unfortunately slipped into the vast canon of bands that sprung to life and fizzled before their music had had a chance to reach a wider audience. Isolated not only by a lack of a proper recording contract, but by geographical distance, insurmountable in the pre-Internet age; the band were utterly detached from the blossoming noise rock scenes that were on a strong upsurge in Western metropolises. Which makes it all the stranger and more impressive just how astute and foreseeing
Gordons is.
Along with immediately obvious noise and space rock schematics, the Gordons’ propensity for thick, wall-of-sound guitars and despondent half-spoken vocals made them an early precursor to both shoegaze and emo, beating out some of the genres’ first pioneers by a hair. It’s starkly audible just how informed by punk-esque upheaval the music is, and though they played at a markedly slower pace, there are moments on
Gordons when the band sound uncannily like the kind of fuzzed-out desperate pleas Fugazi would soon make their hallmark.
The debut barely cracks a half-hour, but the Gordons manage a lot in that short span. “Spik and Span” is all paranoid contemplation around the verses and shredded screams on the hook. “I Just Can’t Stop” kicks off with a crackling start-stop shudder of opiated noise, before an elastic bass-line takes the song into hopscotch punk. Closer “Laughing Now” is a slow grim convulsion, capped off with rapid, reverberated strumming, and “Coalminer Song” just might be the best number Jawbreaker never wrote.
The band would put out another album before disbanding in 1984. By 1987, they would reform as Bailter Space, and while their sound would continue to carry that rattling noise rock template, by then their songwriting had started drifting toward radio modalities, tossing itself between Britpop and Sonic Youth’s more commercial bends. By the time the 90’s rolled around, they were moving further and further into the sort of catchy rave-rock the Stone Roses, Oasis and Supergrass were walking out. And while they never quite managed to cut a bland album, their early formation as The Gordons remains their most singular statement – a visionary blast of transonic unrest, as crude as it was stylish.
