Pitchfork

To call the Goslings' gritty music "post-apocalyptic" might be a tad over-dramatic. But there is something destructive and earth-scorching about their hyper-distorted noise/metal. Maybe "post-disaster" is more like it: Occasion might not sound like the end of the world, but it definitely sounds like the end of a record collection. Imagine a room destroyed by fire, with only melted LPs of black metal, harsh noise, and heavy shoegaze left behind. Pile the remains onto a turntable, dig a needle into the smoldering muck, and it might sound something like the warped sludge of this Florida duo.

On the surface, the Goslings seem dependent on glitches, ripples, and other anomalies produced when extreme volume overloads amplifiers and recoding equipment. Almost nothing on Occasion is clear; everything is caked in a sonic crust so dense, it's hard to imagine how the original notes and beats would sound on their own. But there's more to what Max and Leslie Soren are doing than technical fuckery. Like other prime abusers of audio reproduction-- Coachwhips, Ariel Pink, Sightings-- they use distortion as a tool rather than a gimmick. Their lumbering songs are inherently distorted, written with warped senses of time and tone that require a muddy environment to thrash around in.

That time warp is the most appealing aspect of Occasion. Most songs seem to randomly speed up, slow down, and hit sonic black holes out of time altogether. "Motorcade" sounds like a My Bloody Valentine tune at 16rpm, with big chords stretched into rubbery elastic. The crunchy "Vitium" sticks Leslie's howls inside grinding static, while the album's best track, "Mandy", is a masterpiece of temporal illusion. At first drums set a regular pulse, but soon the pace deadens, then quickens, then caves in on itself, turning guitar sludge, drum pound, and buried vocals into a tornado of debris.

Occasion might sound like an experimental record, and certainly the Goslings push sonic envelopes. But at heart they are a metal band, and their unit of currency is the dark, heavy riff. They never lose sight of the primal power of elongated chords-- each song can be seen as an attempt to test how durable one big riff and one clanging drum beat can be. The answer is almost always "very," and the mileage the Goslings get out of their sputtering twin engines continues to impress.