Black Gaff - Heads
Slap-a-Ham Records was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a formative discovery for me. Obsessed with the attitude, speed, and overall composure of the numerous legendary bands on the label, I spent my teen years ravenously devouring anything and everything I could find from the label. Also unsurprisingly, then, I was not the most popular kid at my high school. But that didn’t matter at all. Because while those kids got invited to do stuff and talked to girls, I had the distinct privilege of listening to Noothgrush, Flash Gordon, and more while playing World of Warcraft alone in my room. Truly I was king of the world.
Needless to say, the collected works of Slap-a-Ham, and more broadly powerviolence as a whole, hold a very special place in my heart. So in theory, I should be ecstatic about powerviolence’s second wave of renewed interest following its 2010s booms. But I’m not. Much of what people are currently passing as powerviolence is little more than already subpar hardcore with a few blast beats shoe-horned in. It is reductive, repetitive and oftentimes lacks any of the sludgey, murky bits that makes powerviolence powerviolence. It is, after all, a genre of contrasts; extreme speed to extreme sluggishness, all within the scope of a 30 second to a minute long song.
Luckily for me, there are still those who understand the invigorating rush of a true-blue powerviolence record. On Heads, Black Gaff demonstrates that they are one such band. Four tracks of pummeling sludge tinged powerviolence and hardcore clock in at just over 4 minutes and are immediately reminiscent of those days of yore. “Deck Meat” is a thirty-five second pummeler that does work the way Capitalist Casualties intended as a quick flurry of blast beats breaks for a second-half suspended in amber. “Pipe Stab” and “Deathride III”, meanwhile, borrow more-so from the labels’ sludgier participants, à la Noothgrush and Eyehategod. While not exactly powerviolence, still not exactly bad company to be in either.
Black Gaff, however, is never in the business of mindlessly rehashing what’s been done before them. Heads shows a band that operates with a knowing nod to their past and a strong grasp of genre fundamentals, all without ever mindlessly regurgitating Crossed Out riffs. Notably more sludgey than many of their ham-slapping heroes, they utilize the rare nod to Man is the Bastard that doesn’t mindlessly slip into excessive parody. Fresh and new but without all the modern trappings of powerviolence 3.0, Heads is a definitive rager that will satiate the most die-hard of Slap-a-Ham fanatics.
