When DECIBEL premiered “Wait For Me“, the first single off the forthcoming debut album of Montreal’s Gorlvsh (pronounced Gore-Lush), they compared the band’s music to a combination of Converge, Death from Above 1979, and Lightning Bolt, “an amalgam of math rock angularity, crushing metallic riffs, off-kilter rhythms and a few catchy hooks in there for good measure”. Gorlvsh themselves described the song as “our attempt to rip off NAILS and be heavy AF”, and as “the song where we finally nailed down the tone we wanted from the unconventional bass rig”.

The bass tone is maybe more important than you realize, because Gorlvsh don’t use a guitar. It’s just bassist Nick Boucher slinging the riffs in ways that provide a lot more than groove, drummer Noah Baxter working in an exhilarating amount of intricacy to go along with a lot of skull-busting, and vocalist Isaac Ruder adding both bleeding-edge intensity and melodic hooks. The result is music that’s sometimes bizarre and mentally unbalancing, sometimes gut-slugging, and sometimes downright enthralling — and rarely follows a straight line.

To go along with that first single, today we’re presenting “Sheppard One Is Down.” This time the band told us the track was their “attempt to rip off a tune from Converge’s last record, but diverged immediately and became something totally different, far slower and more atmospheric than the average Gorlvsh tune.” Continue reading »