In a couple days, Philly-adjacent four-piece Gholas will head out on a weekender that will take them from Columbus, Ohio, through Chicago and Pittsburgh, finally looping south to Washington D.C. before heading back up I-95 to their home in New Jersey (a record release show at Kung Fu Necktie is set for later this month with Sadgiqacea and Lord Dying). The occasion for the roadtrip is the release of their second album, Litanies, which is out today on Dullest Records as the follow-up to 2010’s Zagadka and a prior EP, 2008’s Here I am, Here is Infinity, and which offers just under 40-minutes of vicious and unadulterated pummel.

Their roots are in hardcore. One can hear it easily enough in the vocals of baritone guitarists Bob and Chris (also in the fact that the band is first-names-only), their guttural shouts coming across gruff and raw-throated over the alternately crushing and pummeling tracks on Litanies. The two baritone guitars don’t hurt Gholas‘ overarching tonal thickness, either. Along with Joe‘s bass, they’re able to make a turn like that of the gruelingly slow end of “The Sleeper” into the faster rush of closer “The Fighters” all the more weighted, while drummer Dave handles that and all shifts of pace within the songs with suitable fluidity. While the closing duo both range over nine-minutes, Gholas are never far from a sense of immediacy, the initial thrust and multi-channel vocal tradeoffs of opener “…And the Lives Come Flooding” setting the table for a varied and sometimes disorienting album to come, with shades of Swans-via-Neurosis showing themselves in the guitars and the sense of fluidity that allows the band to transcend aesthetics for an approach less adherent to genre than working in defiance of it.

That’s not to say one can’t hear shades of sludge in the lurching riff of “The Worm,” Converge-style post-hardcore in “With Terrible Purpose” or ambient doom in the surprisingly brief “Call out to the Supplicants,” just that when taken as a whole, Litanies ultimately shows little interest in staying put in one realm or the other stylistically. It works to Gholas‘ advantage over the course of the album, which as a result is best approached front-to-back, rather than one song at a time or in vinyl-style sides. It’s a linear flow, a broader-than-it-at-first-seems range and 39 minutes of multifaceted bludgeoning. You will not hear me complain.

Some of Litanies‘ most atmospherically dense and complex stretches come about in “The Sleeper” and “The Fighters,” but even earlier than that, Gholas establish a brutal course that proves well worth following to its conclusion.

Player, release info and tour dates follow:

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Philadelphia doomhaulers GHOLAS lurk the murky depths of noise, down tuned guitars, no wave, not quite metal and a tad space gazing as only four unfortunate miscreants that spent their formative years in the festering wasteland that is New Jersey could. Their songs are harsh down tuned blasts of sound that scratch the surface of an unhealthy obsession with the writings of Frank Herbert, Philip K Dick and Arthur C. Clarke, among others.

Their latest LP, entitled Litanies, finds the band trimming down their attack while still incorporating the grating noise and ambience of their previous outings into a more concise and, at times, direct aural assault on people’s ears. Litanies was recorded in the winter of 2012/2013 at Red Planet and engineered and mixed by Joe Smiley, with masterful mastering courtesy of James Plotkin.

GHOLAS ON TOUR:
2.13 Columbus OH @ Cafe Bourbon St, The Summit w/ Earthburner
2.14 Chicago IL @ The Burlington
2.15 Pittsburgh PA @ The Rock Room w/ Dendritic Arbor
2.16 Washington DC @ Velvet Lounge
2.26 Philadephia PA @ Kungfu Necktie Record Release Show w/ Lord Dying, Sadgiqacea

Gholas on Thee Facebooks

Gholas on Bandcamp

Dullest Records

Young New Jersey literature hounds Gholas self-released their first full-length, Zagadka (shown here in the Latin alphabet because the Cyrillic wouldn’t display properly), toward the end of 2010. The hour-long long-player, available digitally or on CD, is made up of nine incredibly varied tracks that circle around the stylistic trappings of post-metallic rhythmic churn while also keeping a fresh eye on ambience and noise influences. The triple-vocal four-piece (two guitars, bass and drums with everyone but the drummer singing), which boasts shared personnel with sludgers Deathbeds, are said to have constructed Zagadka around themes taken from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and if that’s the case, it makes sense that the album would have a tendency to meander and be obtuse at times, making it perhaps all the more appropriate that the title translates to “puzzle” or “enigma.”

As seems to be the course of several of the next-gen post-sludge outfits, Gholas haven’t in the least forgotten their apparent hardcore roots. Someone – maybe more than one person – in this band owns a Converge record. Nonetheless, guitarists Chris Morgan and Bob Morgan, bassist John Lamb and drummer Dave Cherasaro (he being the aforementioned Deathbeds connection) bring a heady complexity to the material on the James Plotkin-mastered Zagadka. So much so, in fact, that it could be said that they’re in some need of streamlining their approach. Zagadka opens instrumentally with “A Shape” before moving into the crushing “Tycho Dawn,” and “Behind Every Man Stands Thirty Ghosts”’s noisy atmospherics. What this rounds out to (just doing the math here) is that in the first 12 minutes of Zagadka, the only song, as such, is the six-minute “Tycho Dawn.” The other half of that time is dedicated toward setting the mood of the record, which, frankly, “Tycho Dawn” does anyway. If you tend to be impatient in your listening, it’s something you’re going to want to watch out for.

Fortunately, Gholas follows “Behind Every Man Stands Thirty Ghosts” with what might be the highlight of Zagadka, the 13-minute “… (The Emissary).” The Morgans transpose trademark C.O.C. riffage onto a post-metal frame while Cherasaro adds suitable plod behind and the additional weight of Lamb’s bass adds much-needed thickness. I couldn’t help but wonder in listening what additional instrumentation might do to help fill out the sound more, an undercurrent of synth or some layered-in guitar leads, but although the patterns of the vocals will be familiar to anyone who’s been down the road and back with mid-period Isis, the song satisfies nonetheless. “From Hundreds of Millions of Miles,” which follows immediately, opens with an almost identical guitar line, but quickly moves in a different direction, the two guitars playing off each other more and stopping less, lending the song a more complete feel. Tradeoff vocals help in this too, and if there’s anywhere Zagadka shows its true potential in terms of depth of arrangement, it’s here. The cut as a whole is tighter and more nuanced than a lot of what Gholas have to offer, though they bleed right from it into the barely-there ambience of “The Mobius Loop.”

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