Review Summary: Everything wrong with both modern hardcore punk and LGBT extremism in one seven minute package.
I've found GLOSS's newest, and likely last, release "Trans Day of Revenge" to be a very difficult listen and an even more difficult thing to properly review. When listening to music, especially punk music, taking an artist's message with a grain of salt is very important. Discounting bands like Minor Threat and Earth Crisis simply for their straight edge messages or Crass and Zounds for their radical anarchist messages just because you disagree with them would just be robbing yourself of some great punk rock after all. In the case of GLOSS however, I find it impossible to separate the message from the music behind it.
You see gloss are a 'queercore' band made up exclusively of trans members and practically all of their lyrical content centers around trans issues. Over the course of this 7 minute EP, the band hit you over the head with their radical and dumbfounded anti-cishet, anti-white, anti-male, anti-gay message against boring and generic d-beats and thrashy riffs that would have been considered dated 20 years ago. There's not much good to be said for hardcore punk music that sounds like it's stuck in the 80s and it's doubtful a band like this would have ever received any attention at all without their gimmick and message. The songs are each around a minute or a minute and a half long, too short to leave any sort of real impression beyond wishing I was listening to a band with some actual songwriting talent. The EP does have some genuine heaviness to it as the production gives much more punch to the instruments than their woefully lo-fi demo. The vocals courtesy of Sadie Switchblade have a great deal of energy and anger behind them as well, misplaced as the lyrics are. The vocals and production are about the only positives I can say about the EP though as nearly everything else about it ranges from mundane and trite to offensively stupid.
The lyrics are really what propel this album into the abyss though. With a different message I could see a release like this being inoffensive and bland, not good, but nothing horrible enough to really offend. Forget what people are saying about this being some kind of "tribute" to fallen transfolk or anything of the sort. Trans Day of Revenge carries with it a message of violence that ignores any nuance or subtlety. The first track "Give Violence a Chance," as the title suggests promotes killing cis people because...well they're cis of course! They even manage to throw in a totally unrelated reference to Black Lives Matter in the chorus. "Fight" is an antifa song, and it's about as absent minded and unrealistic as any other antifa song. The title track is probably the most depraved and absurd song on the entire EP where the band even managed to throw in an anti-gay line in addition to the normal anti cishet garbage. Because even other oppressed members of the LGBT+ community aren't safe from GLOSS's wrath.
Messages are something I can normally not take too seriously in the context of music but as a fellow queer person and a victim of the extreme violence and abuse that the members of this band claim to be preaching against, GLOSS just hit a bit to close to home for me. This awful message of violence is the reason the alt right exist and are taken seriously. When the bigots make us out to be "degenerates" and rant about our "agenda" the members of GLOSS are the first people they point towards as examples. Ironically enough this sentiment does far more to harm LGBT+ rights than it does to advance them. Trans Day of Revenge could have been a mediocre and forgettable hardcore punk album but with such a disgusting mentality behind it, this EP ends up being one of the absolute worst I've listened to this year.
