Shallow

"Originally released on the Parts Unknown label, whose debut release was a single by The Gatecrashers - a fast hardcore quartet featuring the same four gents who play on this album - Shallow has been out of print since PU shut up shop in 2011. Sub Pop's reissue, along with their 2004 debut single `Throbbing Organ', is thus a public service of sorts. Not just so people can buy the LP without having to spend £40 or more, but also to (hopefully) correct the notion that Shallow is an ignorable, semi-formed gobbet of noisy incoherence, made before those smart cookies at the big indie label knocked them into shape".

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"Pissed Jeans' black-eyed view of punk doesn't brighten on Shallow-it just comes into focus. On "Ugly Twin (I've Got)", Korvette projects his self-loathing onto a doppelganger; Fry's riffs buckle under the combined weight of that ingrown hatred, grinding along at a snail's pace and punctuated by scrambled, Greg Ginn-esque licks. That punch-the-mirror repugnance at one's own navel-gazing existence takes a darkly comic turn on "Ashamed of My Cum". Gnawing at his own syllables with all the puzzled-panther ferocity of Darby Crash, Korvette blurs and slurs his masturbatory confessional in an aptly orgasmic yowl of agony".

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