DOWNLOAD: Gore - "Search Love" (MP3) (track hosted on SouthernLord.com)

Southern Lord has done a fabulous job resurrecting the first two CDs from Dutch dirge/instrumental rock band Gore. Southern Lord has packaged the band’s first two discs, Hart Gore (1986) and Mean Man’s Dream (1987) as a 2-CD set and each disc includes bonus tracks that amount to an “alternate” version, composed of live and demo tracks, of each of the studio LPs.

For anyone not familiar with Gore, the band plays aggressive, pounding instrumental rock that fits well alongside bands like Big Black, the Swans and My War-era Black Flag. At the time of their original incarnation, Gore had limited name recognition in the US but the band toured in Europe with the Rollins Band, Young Gods, Swans and Bad Brains.

While both discs are instrumentals, they were issued with lyric sheets to provide a vemonous “horror show” element to the band’s menacing sound. Lyrics are included in the CD booklet along with detailed liner notes from bassist Rob Frey (aka Marij Hel). Clear production by Rollins Band producer Theo van Eenburgen (aka Theo van Rock) gives the band a big sound, balancing Danny Arnold’s pounding drums with Pieter de Sury’s searing guitar lines.

Hart Gore is the more brutal of the two albums and the songs clock in around the two-minute mark. With Mean Man’s Dream, the songs are both more mature and slightly longer in length. On this later album, the band embraces more complex musical structures and hits a repetitive industrial groove similar to what Godflesh used in later years. This evolution is sort of the same path that Black Flag went down between their My War and The Process of Weeding Out LPs. You can definitely hear Gore’s influence on bands like Godflesh and The Melvins and perhaps on later period Big Black (Gore worked with Steve Albini on their final studio album)

It is great to see this material back in print as original versions of these discs are selling for $70 - $100 on Amazon. This Southern Lord reissue is available as both a double CD (containing all ‘four’ albums) or as two 2-LP sets.

Links:
Southern Lord