Review Summary: Only cowards hide the crash on the one.
Music got upgraded to Music 2 when we learned the murk-dirge could be compulsive and moving, when we learned to admit that drums really are that loud. Gramme are wise to this; their EP "Pre Release" is constructed from concussions and shudders, makes you shudder yourself. It dominates the palate like soup cooked by neutron stars. (And when there's a pair of neutron stars at the back of the stage there hardly needs to be a conventional star on the mic.)
They deal in stripped-back dance punk, like disco filtered through ye olde post-punk funk and draped with somewhat-retrogadget ambient ornaments, overhead jitters and drumstick splinters swirlin the batcave, the sounds of squelched modem interruption and insistent crickets surfs in a twoheaded bassist and drummer giant's wake... but that's them being normal, as on "Lovely", "Crooks and Criminals" or "Telephone Me", where the hook is naked monomania, simple-but-proficient dance music driven a little deeper by the bubbled-up stew sensibility.
Try "Rehab", where Gramme summon jazzed-up hip-punk and let the cymbal smashing really loose! The song gibbers with fevered energy, its wrongfooted bass riff making the rarest grooves possible. On the other side of the EP there's "Close Your Eyes" with its big indie sonkyouth bass riff and double-time drumboxing, as played by punks with the judgment of D&B sample pickers. That's two crucial songs that neither the original wave of post-punkers or the US revivalists could ever have assembed left languishing on an undermentioned disc from 1999.
Apparently Gramme fold for fifteen entire years beyond this point. Too long to let such potential simmer.
