Gosford

The bar is small – dingy – semi-crowded and smokey. The air is heavy and the smell of stale alcohol is vaguely reminiscent of dried cat piss, but there are people here – and people equals an audience. Naturally enough, the audience is small – a tight-knit group of emo/screamo kids that are all out to support the band of their sister’s boyfriend’s something-or-other. They know nothing of the band written on the schedule board in big chunky letters, but they’ll stick around, and by the end of the night, they’ll be logging into their MySpace accounts for a second (or third, or fourth) listen, because here’s the thing – Gosford aren’t emo/screamo. These guys are rock. Hard rock. But most importantly, these guys are GOOD. The REAL kind of good. Any band can be made to sound good in a studio. Conditions are at their peak and the artists are given the luxury of choosing from numerous takes. The challenge comes when performing live. Anyone who has heard the tracks on Gosford’s MySpace can admit that “hey, these guys aren’t all that bad” and they possess a great deal of potential. But does that potential translate in a crummy bar with bad sound and a claustrophobic stage area? For Gosford, apparently it does.
There’s an insane sort of energy hovering around their live performances – something aggressive and wonderful that pulls you in through the thrum of the bass-line or the scream of the guitars. Their singer’s got talent – quite a bit of it – coupled with a wonderfully dark and somewhat husky voice that wraps itself around your gut and pulls, just a bit. For a band that’s relatively unknown they have a seemingly tight grasp over their lyrics, playing, and stage pressence. The songs are original enough, aggressive enough, hard enough and melodic enough to keep drawing you deeper and deeper into the music. But most importantly, these guys aren’t passive performers. Regardless of the fact that there’s literally NO ROOM on the square of carpet marked off as the “stage” they’re all rocking out as hard as humanly possible – complete with stage jumps, head banging and various contortions of their guitarists bodies – and those of us that have come out to see them are giddy with energy. Keep your eyes and ears on these boys people, because they seriously have the potential to go far. Very far.

- The Modern Hype Independent