(2020) Gulfer - Gulfer


Review:
When lead singer and guitarist Vincent Ford swore, “I’ll stay the same old man,” on Gulfer’s 2018 album Dog Bless, it sounded like a tongue-in-cheek salve for being anti-social. He’s making good on that promise. Instead of clinging onto their youth — the oft-chosen path for emo-adjacent guitar bands of their ilk — the Montreal quartet face the realities of entering your late-20s on their new self-titled album, from the dissolution of underwhelming friendships to the comfortable cadence of self-doubt. There’s no listing off of complaints or self-pitying displays of narcissism. In its place, Gulfer use the album as a sounding board for the quotidian fears of adulthood while grounding themselves in musical and lyrical maturity.Ford, singer-guitarist Joe Therriault, singer-bassist David Mitchell, and drummer Julien Daoust collaborate in a way that makes the moral quandaries on Gulfer sound communal. There’s the omnipresent weight of a college-dropout inferiority complex, generational disagreements about the effects of climate change, and nostalgia for the naivety of childhood. In “Heat Wave,” Therriault recounts the uptick in performative conversations with friends that turn prosaic, as if prevaricating due to ego as opposed to masking imposter syndrome. “Biking home I wonder why/You say you’re working class when it feels right,” he repeats, his deadpan lilt verging on dejection. Scattered throughout are the type of declarative statements that increasingly ring true throughout adulthood: “You go out of your way to stay the same,” “It’s easy to say it should have been better in the end,” and, most bleak of all, “I belong in my house.”Gulfer raise a bunch of these questions across the album but never really offer an answer. It’s refreshing, particularly because that humility prevents their “issues” from being blown out of proportion, like on“Forget (Friendly),” when Therriault develops a crush on someone while in a monogamous relationship. Wracked by guilt, he ping-pongs ideas about how to ethically support both people while riff after riff crashes into the downbeat. These are the moments that define Gulfer; when the melodrama of teenagerdom and the pessimism of young adulthood subside, and resignation guides the long run ahead. To really draw that emotion out, Gulfer turn to their most impressive skill: dexterous finger-tapping and complex drum shuffles. Something as simple as a stringy guitar melody on “Flashing” or syncopated rhythms on “Trips and Falls” distill math-rock elements into digestible pop hooks that punch up their stories. On “Letters,” a restless sugar-rush of a song, the four-piece nod to fellow Canadians the Most Serene Republic with indie-rock-indebted drum rolls, a musical mirror of its lyrics about the temptation to upend your life altogether.Gulfer’s maturity shines in the album’s mixing, too, in part thanks to Great Grandpa’s Dylan Hanwright manning the boards. It recreates a dialed-in basement show, a fitting stereo setup for a genre that’s best experienced when you can hear kids screaming along over the vocalist. Across the album, the band is more certain of their uncertainty, and consequently more bummed out than ever before in their eight-year career. They’ve entered adulthood, and they’re already more level-headed about what that means than most of emo’s forebearers were.





Tracklist:
01 - Intro
02 - Blurry
03 - Nature Kids
04 - Forget (Friendly)
05 - Interlude
06 - Heat Wave
07 - Mall Song
08 - Letters
09 - Carefully
10 - Flashing
11 - Symmetry
12 - Trips and Falls
13 - Outro


Media Report:
Genre: indie-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits