Gas Rag - On the Beach 7"

The final and posthumous Gas Rag 7 inch rushes them out the door with the same screwed-tight hardcore fury that blazed them through their previous releases. The same speedpunk Fix fix, stamping runners of unbreakable cycles, vicious circles, snarling with cynical karma on On The Beach "Don't we all deserve to crawl?", confronting the inevitability of fucked destinies on Human Bomb "His path was clear he had no choice/Now he's a human bomb", the social prisons of Short Leash, the real prisons of Neglect, a series of jails spun out of complacencies and worn paths followed, built and maintained from structures unchallenged and flourishing, conventions obeyed. Burning and bright, Gas Rag made hardcore confined and screaming.

Gas Rag - Beats Off MLP

Gas Rag Beats Off. Gas Rag breaks in. More brisk whirrs of hardcore punk, ravenous in its eradicative wants, disgusted in its truths, raw with the crepitus of the world's broken bones. Biting fiercely at the drugwar apathy with gruff blunt repetition: "SIXTY THOUSAND DEAD. SIXTY THOUSAND ARE DEAD." on Drugs and Violence. Life traps catalogued/struggled with on The Clock: "LIFE BY THE CLOCK, IT'S A TIME BOMB" and Criminal Gas: "GOT CAUGHT, HANDCUFFED, A NEW COURT DATE/MAYBE COULD HAVE ESCAPED, NOW IT'S TOO LATE". Death worship drawn and trashed on Endless Vietnam, Mass Grave and It's a Gift. Beats Off runs at sex with the same dry sharp rush as it runs at war evils on the title track: "BEAT OFF AND FEELING FREE", self-abuse as self-demarcation, brief relief from those traps, from that pain. It smacks down the ugly smugness of twee science fetishism as easily as it rips up the vast hypocracies of religion on Annihilation: "ANOTHER WAR IN THE NAME OF RELIGION AND WE ARE THE PAWNS/BUT'S IT'S FUCKING SCIENCE THAT GAVE US THE BOMB."

These ills and more laid down hard in short hardcore punk cuts that might lean into powerviolence territory in their brevity, but keeping it firmly in the sharpened punk claws of 80s snotheads like Dayglo Abortions or 90s terminal velocity burnthrash like Death Wish Kids. For in all it's rage it rarely flirts with chaos, these songs aren't crashing into themselves and exploding, not squealing manically into noise tantrums, these venoms are tightly controlled, tripwire taught, toeing a shock-collar line of nervous form, corralled and driven onwards by the piston drumming, like a coin whirling around a table in a spin, the speed maintains the poise, the ferocity spat out with presence and furious tightrope grace. A few times this tension breaks, it wails away on Annihilation in a scratching addict itch and whine, it wriggles out on It's a Gift, but for the most part this anger, just and terse, is aimed true. Spasms of pith and hard rancor and speed, outlining the aches and woes of the living and carrying a deep rage for the unsettled dead.
 

Gas Rag - Human Rights EP

Some Cülo/Acid Reflux freaks running speedpunk hustles. Sharp and jerky, guitars snapping back and forth with menace, but this shit, like Cülo  is not uncatchy. Though it's strapping a garrotte guitar tone to a beat too fast to headnod to, when it hits lines like "THIS WORLD IS SUCH A DRAG/SO PUT SOME SHOE GOO IN A BAG!" on Pass Out or "THE WEIGHT OF LIFE KEEPS BEARING DOWN ON ME/2012 DISAPPOINTS WE'RE LEFT WAITING FOR THE END!" on The End, you're singin. Like Pusrad, but not as utterly monomaniacal in its brevity (6 songs in 6 minutes, not 31 in 10), and a little dirtier too. Its thin hardcore-punk is packed with little moments, like the brief basscut on Abort Them, the slow start to Final Peace accelerating almost immediately, the mid-tempo kick in The End and a little bass wobble like a starter motor burbling into action, that you can't get away from, and make you blast them one more time.

Nihilism born of rage, political impotence and despair screamed on Hebron ("THE LAND ALWAYS GOES TO THIEVES") twisting and flowering into caustic extinction desire, be it of the hated power bases (Abort Them), the the world itself (Final Peace offers hippies a true chance at peace in a wholly dead world, The End is self-explanatory) or just of brain (Pass Out). The most positive song on this thing is about running away from home to be a bankrobber, like The Dwarve's dumb-death-pop Runaway #2, done up all in frenetic ribbons and with the criminal's life painted as a weird endless soulsearching with stolen guns and sharpied anarchy symbols.) Out on Beach Impediments Records, this a tight fist of punk punch.