Chasing Fridays: Gina Gory, Greg Mendez, Sunami live, and more

Hello and welcome back to another edition of Chasing Fridays – my weekly roundup of music criticism and gig reviews. Earlier this week, I published a massive report of my time going gonzo at a Ken Carson concert. I had a lot of fun writing it up and I implore you to check it out even if you're unfamiliar with Carson's music. I also turned 30 this week (on Halloween), so that's pretty cool. But for this edition of my newsletter, I eschewed rage-rap commentary and self-indulgent birthday reflection and instead wrote about some new music and a show I saw last Friday.

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Gina Gory - Died Laughing

Gina Gory sound like Feeble Little Horse with molasses stuck on their wheels. The burgeoning Pittsburgh band's debut LP, Died Laughing, is composed of songs that glug and glob, inching out of their containers like ketchup from a glass Heinz bottle. Like their city-mates in Feeble, who Gina Gory have the distinction and misfortune of being compared to, their output is a PB&J-like blend of of sputtering slowcore and brittle shoegaze. However, where Feeble's lackadaisical hooks and improvisational quirks fall off of them like hand-brushed couch crumbs, Gina Gory's intoned melodies stick to their songs and require repeated scrubbing to set free.

The Soccer Mommy-ish chord progression of "TV Star" is buried under a tapestry of droney feedback that gurgles like a busted washing machine, recalling one of Water From Your Eyes' twitchy noise-rock loops. "Dog" gargles like a flooded engine, its warped tremolo bends spinning the main riff into a vertigo-inducing stupor while the vocals purr in slow-mo. Digested in chunks, Died Laughing is a fabulous way to drown your senses in gooey, gum-filling slowcore. But, like a bowl of toffee set out at a dinner party, indulging in more than a few pieces at a time, especially the full 42-minute course in one sitting, is a surefire way to make your tummy ache. The best albums in this milieu (They Are Gutting a Body of Water's brisk s, Full Body 2's three-song EPs, Feeble Little Horse's sub-30-minute LPs) all use leanness to their advantage. Still, Gina Gory are worth risking the cavities for.

Underneath - It Exists Between Us

I saw this band play with deathcore revivalists Thus Spoke Zarathustra earlier this summer and they didn't quite have the juice. Live, it came across to me as metalcore kids dipping their toes into death metal for the first time. (I assume the band name is a nod to Code Orange's maligned 2020 album of the same name? If not, I guess it's just a #pittsburghcoincidence.) On their debut album, It Exists Between Us, I think Underneath come across more compelling. Lars Gotrich of NPR pegged it as Zao with slam parts, which is a cool way of describing what basically sounds like Myspace deathcore of the Despised Icon variety. I'd also bet money that Vein were a huge gateway band for these dudes, because I hear more 2010s-era metalcore skronk in here than Zao/Converge. In terms of Pittsburgh stuff of this variety, if you miss Hazing Over and want something that's bulkier and more traditionally extreme than Kicked In the Head By a Horse, then Underneath will do nicely.

A Good Year, Horse Vision - "YSL"

Horse Vision are one of my favorite discoveries of 2024. The Swedish duo of John Nilsson, a Hollywood sound designer who worked on the Aftersun soundtrack, and Gabriel Von Essen, also of the Stockholm band World Gym, are signed to Bladee's Year0001 label and only have six songs to their name. Almost all of them are incredible (their August instrumental "11" is just OK), and I'm honestly kind of surprised that they haven't caught on yet. Their latest, "YSL," is a collaborative cut with Copenhagen experimentalists A Good Year, whose 2024 album sounds kind of like recent Oneohtrix Point Never one second and A Moon Shaped Pool-era Radiohead the next. Horse Vision sound like Nordic Alex G, and together, the two groups penned one of the most blissfully quixotic indie-folk tunes of the year. I couldn't sing you a single word of it yet it's still stuck in my head, which is much of a ringing endorsement as I could give.

Greg Mendez - First Time/Alone

A couple months back, I wrote a mea culpa for dismissing Greg Mendez's 2023 self-titled album as mediocre Elliott Smith worship. Upon seeing him live a couple times this year, his singular magnetism slugged me in the gut, and when he released his first single on Dead Oceans back in September, I felt like one of Popeye's foes getting punched over a saloon table. The Philly songwriter's brilliance is so obvious to me now, and his new four-song EP, First Time/Alone, is easily one of my favorite short-form releases of 2024. A song like "Alone" is imbued with so much heartache, but it never sounds anything less than totally authentic. "Pain Meds" conveys more emotion in a minute of shabby acoustic strums and pitched-up chirps than most bands manage to get across throughout a 45-minute LP. I first wrote about Mendez's music back in 2018. I had no idea I'd still be thinking about him in 2024, let alone heralding him as one of our generation's most promising indie voices. It's funny how life works out.

Virtual Dreams II - Ambient Explorations in the House and Techno Age, 1993-1999

I don't know what makes ambient music good or not. It either sounds good to me or it doesn't. It's either something I'll obsessively replay for weeks on end while reading or doing work or it's something I'll immediately discard for some pedantic fault my brain identifies and fixates on. I don't have the patience to sit quietly and actively listen to ambient music. For me, ambient music is utilitarian. It's sound that allows me to focus on something else. Some people use hardcore or metal for the same purpose when they're in the gym. They just need something to keep them going. All I can say about this hour-and-a-half compilation of Japanese ambient music is that it keeps me going. It sounds damn good to my ears. Some of it leans more toward ambient house, and that sounded good when I was driving through my neighborhood the other night when it finally dipped below 50 degrees. Most of the album, however, is drumless and unobtrusively placid, and it's served as a nice accompaniment to my reading of Steinbeck's East of Eden. See if it keeps you going, too.

Sunami, Ingrown, Torena, Too Pure to Die, Arc of Violence @ Preserving

This show was my barometer for testing whether Sunami's hype has waned or waxed since their post-pandemic takeover. And I knew the answer was "waxed" by the time I arrived at the venue parking lot and had trouble finding a spot. In March 2023, I saw Sunami sell out the 250-cap room of this venue at a time when not even Code Orange were able to sell out the 250-cap room of this venue. Since then, Sunami have headlined almost every hardcore festival they've played, and they're objectively one of the biggest bands of the genre's 2020s renaissance, even though they're rarely mentioned by general-interest music journos who pretend like Militarie Gun are the biggest band next to Knocked Loose and Turnstile. They're not. It's Drain. And then probably Sunami, whose popularity has only been challenged in recent months by Speed.

Sunami are a huge fucking band, and it's especially crazy that they're as big as they are considering how raw and menacing their music is. There're no big sing-alongs or palatable crossover riffs in Sunami's songs. They make one-dimensionally furious beatdown hardcore with gangster-rap swagger and lyrics about killing cops and fighting opps. Their tongue-in-cheek attitude and quotable one-liners ("187 on a P-I-G") are about the only elements of their their music that strike me as "accessible." Otherwise, their vertebrae-busting mosh parts, scabrous growls, brutish riffs, and caustic production are only appealing to people who like extreme music.

Clearly, a lot of the people who found hardcore through Sunami (specifically: teenagers on TikTok) are still into Sunami. Last Friday, Sunami sold out the 1000-cap room in this Pittsburgh venue just two weeks after Terror and the Cro-Mags failed to do the same. The audience mostly consisted of people I don't usually see at hardcore shows, which meant that the evening's pit activity was a mixture of acrobatic arm-swinging and giddy push-pitting. Fortunately, the vibes never turned sour and I didn't clock any fights between the different types of dancers (as has unfortunately become common at this venue in recent months), and I a had big ole smile on my face watching hordes of teens lose their shit to Sunami, flinging off the stage and swirling around the pit.

The other bands on the bill were varying degrees of cool and meh. Pittsburgh locals Arc of Violence released an EP last month that a lot of people in the scene seem to dig, but I don't think they've found their sound yet and the songs don't do anything for me. Too Pure to Die are 2000s straight-edge vets who Preserving Underground owner AJ Raussau currently drums for, and they set the dancefloor off with a bunch of Throwdown-lite bangers and a cover of Hatebreed's "Under the Knife." It was fine. Torena, who Sunami are cosigning as one of the Bay Area's next exports, unleashed a vicious sound that reminds me of slower, groovier Nails. They were good, but not as good as Ingrown, who have blown my mind every time I've seen them and just check every box a hardcore band should. Scary looking dudes who flawlessly rip through songs that are either lightning-fast or belligerently chuggy, and the room went fucking apeshit for them. Boise on top, as they say.