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Review & Lyric Video Premiere: Gomer Pyle, Before I Die I…

Posted in Bootleg Theater, Reviews on February 18th, 2020 by JJ Koczan

Gomer Pyle before I die I

[Click play above to see the premiere of Gomer Pyle’s ‘Laeviculus’ from their new album, Before I Die I…, out Feb. 28 on The Lab and Three Chords Records.]

A new full-length from Dutch-native heavy rockers Gomer Pyle isn’t something that simply happens every year or every other year. Or every five. Or 10. To wit, Before I Die I… is the third Gomer Pyle album, arriving as a 2LP through The Lab Records and Three Chords Records, and it follows behind their 1999 debut, Eurohappy, and its 2008 follow-up, Idiots Savants. While it’s true they’ve had a couple EPs out along the way, the latest of them being 2016’s three-song GP — which boasted “Side Kings,” also featured here as the longest track at 11:51 — three records over the course of 21 years, a one-per-seven-years average is still not a rate one would call prolific. One could spend months waxing poetic about the different world that 2020 presents as opposed to 2008, but the occasion bringing the band — with the listed membership of guitarist/vocalist Mark Brouwer, guitarist Mark van Loon, keyboardist Danny Gras (who also recorded), bassist Danny Huijgens and drummer Kees Haverkamp — together for Before I Die I… is more personal, and the clue is in the name. Like Astrosoniq‘s 2018 offering, Big Ideas Dare Imagination (review here), the title Before I Die I… is an extrapolation from Bidi, the first name of former manager Bidi van Drongelen, who passed away in June 2017. So that covers why.

As to how long some of these songs have been kicking around, the easiest guess considering the prior appearance of “Side Kings” is a mix of newer and older ideas, and Gomer Pyle‘s sound works much the same way, be it the progressive grunge of the penultimate “Your Demon,” which taps Alice in Chains-style harmonies and darkened vibes before resolving in a sudden thrust of harder-hitting noisy jaggedness, or the fluidity across 10-minute opener  “Remember the Days,” which gradually makes its way in over the first two-plus minutes and continues to unfold patiently despite an underlying rhythmic tension and a chorus of the type that one ends up hoping will be stuck in the head when it’s over, with just a current of pop-style wistfulness in the vocals that finds its payoff in the finale “Cyclus,” amid an instrumental build that the band gracefully let go into the ether after just four minutes of repeated lyrical structures and harmonizing. Across the 62 minutes and nine songs of Before I Die I…‘s span — and it is a span — the group make a case for themselves as being among the great lost generation of pre-social media underground heavy rock, but as with their countrymen in Astrosoniq, that “heavy rock” in their sound is really just a launch point for broader exploration.

Whether it’s “The Buzzer” bringing its hook after “Remember the Days” or the winding, swinging and brash “Scum Trade” or the insistent push of “Nicky McGee,” which follows — that one-two punch arriving, by the way, on the other end of the gorgeous unfurling of “Side Kings,” which is enough of a highlight that one hopes the 2LP positions it as its own side, simply because it deserves to stand alone — Gomer Pyle triumph through the varied currents of their songwriting, tying together sonic diversity through performance and distinctive tone and melody.

gomer pyle live at roadburn 2016

That’s not new math by any means, and while one wouldn’t accuse them of being revolutionary — for one thing, the word implies an urgency that despite some of their speedier grooves is undercut by the years between their releases — neither are Gomer Pyle anything resembling derivative in style. Rather, they present enough changes and shifts across Before I Die I… that one never quite knows where the next song is going to go, and that lack of predictability only makes finding out all the more thrilling as “Nicky McGee” rough-and-tumbles its way into the languid eight-minute stretch of “We Are One,” where the sweet and psychedelic guitar melody signals the emotional resonance at its core throughout the keyboard-laced linear build to come, meeting with a due payoff.

The subsequent “Laeviculus” is charged with distilling the sort of fluidity brought by “We Are One” and perhaps marrying it to some of the more straightforward impulses presented throughout Before I Die I…, but it does this across a six-minute run that still wants nothing for reach or memorability, thanks to a standout guitar solo in its second half, a particularly strong vocal, and a sense of nuance that extends to the timing of the snare hits around the five-minute mark. As it surges late and makes its sudden departure, it’s up to “Your Demon” to continue the momentum, which it does with a classic heavy rock swaggering groove, albeit one dressed in grunge melody and a quirky intertwining of guitar lines in the verse, perhaps hinting at some of the more open toying with structure that follows, but if there’s resolution to be had, it comes not only in the finality of the last thuds in “Your Demon” itself, but in the opening piano lines of “Cyclus,” which is, again, gorgeous and rife with class and sincerity without pretense, keeping a current of experimentalism in low-end electronic pulses underneath the emergent build, but finding its footing in the dramatic and sing-along ready vocals, though they’re there for a surprisingly short time.

Aren’t we all.

I did not know Bidi van Drongelen, and seeing the impact his loss had on the community of which he was a part has only made that more regrettable, but grief is universal and touches everyone at one point or another to some measure. The manner in which Gomer Pyle channel that into the scope of Before I Die I… is the type of homage not simply everyone could pay, channeling not just the sadness of losing someone who matters to you, but representing and celebrating the beautiful, complex wholeness of a life worth missing. Even separated from this context, its emotional crux is striking and powerful, and the multifaceted nature of the band’s approach stands up to whatever angle or read one might want to put to it in craft, performance and presentation.

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The Lab Records website

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