Gooseberry – “Go Fish”
Photo by PMill Media
Brooklyn trio Gooseberry ratchet up the tempo and go on the rampage with “Go Fish.”
“Go Fish” captures the sleek, hypnotic, and primal charm of acts like Nirvana and QOTSA. It roars and growls in a way that shakes both the ground and your bones, pushing it slightly out of the stoner rock rubric and into something heavier and more potent. We are in a space of tantalizing danger between art metal and pop.
The instrumentation rocks and swaggers, built on the visceral, dark, enveloping, carnal menace of pounding Dave Grohl-esque drums and brawny, crunchy guitars. It is the sound of a swaggering, ruthless demolition in progress. There is nuance in the chaos; sounds are allowed to simmer and linger, with fuzzy notes hanging meditatively among the rubble, while trippy guitar tones are injected in all the right spots to heighten the explosive sense of tension and release.
The vocal imbues the track with a wide-eyed Arizona desert spaciness, a similar relaxed, cool meltdown to what you might expect from Josh Homme. The intoxicating performance isn’t about shouting; it’s about floating over the carnage and hypnotic grooves. Supported by dreamlike, almost haunted harmonies, it’s a performance that ticks all the boxes.
On the track, Gooseberry adds: “Go Fish is about realizing a few more years have got behind you than you remembered—i.e. turning 30 and finding out the hard way that your mind and your body operate differently than they did in the carefree days of your twenties. There’s still a burning fire, but the blaze has changed in color. Thinking too hard about the passage of time inevitably leads to thoughts of nostalgia and yearning for simpler times, like the perfect youth that your memory sanitizes as it drifts further from your present.”