Review: .Gif From God ‘Digital Red’ EP
This review has been a long time coming as I’ve been regularly listening to it since its release back in March, but life being what it is, you can only read my thoughts a few months later. Did my opinion change during this period of time? Yeah, pretty heavily if I’m being honest, but I think we can all benefit from it.
.Gif From God (also spelt DOTGIFFROMGOD) has always been a bit of a mystery within the mathcore crowd over the years. I sort of remember how the kvltiest of my mathcore circle were saying they were the shit, only to be told at another event from similar friends to repeat the same sentence, minus the’. Yeah, that got me a bit cold and didn’t pay so much attention apart from the few times I would hear it at a gig or on a playlist. The hype was there, but I paid attention to different Richmond-based bands instead. Funnily enough, there is another Richmond-based band that is getting all the hype right now and it’s not .Gif From God! For shame, zoomers, for shame! But I digress.
Their latest EP is called Digital Red and when I first listened to it, my chromesthesia was like ‘yep, sounds red to me, awesome!’. And then the effect kind of petered out and moved on. I listen to it again a week later and I loved it again. And it petered out again and moved on. That lasted a good month before I managed to make my own opinion on this six-tracker. My verdict? It’s a great, great mathcore/grindcore record, but it would have been better if it had a few more tracks and released as a full-length, but I still insist on the fact that this release is really good.
You can hear how disturbing the music is and how disturbed the vocalists are (Andrew Schwartz and Mitchie Shue, to name them), especially on a kiss for every hornet or the EP opener knife goes in, guts come out. The musical references that you can hear on the second half of the record (the cow’s meow, meat_man meets man and dream features will make sense to anyone who had a Poison The Well or Fall of Troy patch in their lives but who could also get their kicks by listening to Noothgrush every once in a blood moon.
You can hear how disturbing the music is and how disturbed the vocalists are…
The experimental interlude youth medium: child psychic is really where they kept losing me as a fan of mathcore, noise and grindcore. At this point, I cannot really tell if it has to do with the mix being shoddy on purpose, or because my chromesthesia flags this song as grey instead of red, or simply because it’s a chaotic, experimental mess that somewhat leaves me unbothered at a point where I was really getting into it. That’s where I think it would have been a far superior record if they left this one out for a different release, or if they added a couple more that would sound a tad more cohesive.
But hey, four and a half bangers out of six is still impressive when you choose to go on a route that is very niche and ambitious, but doing it better than the people who inspired you, because I can see .Gif From God being listened to and appreciated in five years’ time whereas most bands they’ve been inspired by did not age that well.
That being said, it is absolutely great to see similar bands like Pupil Slicer and Vein.FM (with whom they collaborated on a split in 2017) are doing things according to the stuff they love to listen and how they can replicate that into their own sounds, which explains their relative popularity. This is clearly a formula that needs to be nurtured so we can have more interesting bands to fawn over and enjoy in the long run
Label: Prosthetic Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Scribed by: Nessie Spencer
