Regular Gonzales: Beige Alert | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- For a band always on the watch for shorts at gigs, Regular Gonzales don’t seem particularly keen on small things. The sheer weight of their music has you scratching your head as to how a three piece can combine to birth such a bulky, beautiful, behemoth. Maybe that point is akin to a Zen Koan and the more you dwell on it, the less you can enjoy what’s around you. What’s around you when you’re listening to Biege Alert is an abundance of bouncy grooves displayed with self-assured gravity. Now on their second album in what will hopefully be a long string of releases, Regular Gonzales have hit their stride. Part of me also thinks the mad bastards have cut their own brake lines, because slowing down doesn’t seem to be an option.

Schoonhenge swaggers through a door it had to boot open because each hand was holding precious glass pies. An ode to blowing froth off cold ones embarks on constructing something as awesome as its (near) namesake and succeeds with time to spare, to knock off early to go the pub. A real bottomless bar tab grime sticks a constant hammering from the instruments together. After opening with attention-demanding bravado, Afterthought slides slyly in, to cause as much chaos as it can before being noticed. A much less measured track in comparison to the opener: panicked guitars stutter, instilling a frenzied mood. You’re kept on your toes with angular jaunts and dissonant shrills peaking through. Those are offset by a banging, straight-forward breakdown; a piece of composition that Regular Gonzales regularly nail.

Singing is flirted with ever so slightly during Forget The Gold and a few tracks we’ll talk about in a moment. It’s a disembodied kind of singing though: one you’d expect to hear from an important voice doling out speeches to the masses from some ancient and monolithic pulpit. The meat of the song itself is a lunging rhythm that pounds away like mega-machine pistons and the discordant squeals accompanying it are only there to lift the pressure. Blowback and Hex Worker boast massive rhythms. Both peak and crumble in on themselves like the old, eroded stone would of that monstrous ancient podium. The stentorian singing we talked about earlier on Forget The Gold returns to soothe the 'tumbling dodge-em-cars' moments on the last two tracks. Pounding, unending rhythms smoothed over by vocals that sit just out of reach.

Monuments to how immense and regal three instruments can sound, Regular Gonzales are a band bigger than the shorts they wear and they produce ample gansonade which is backed up by airtight songs. Biege Alert gives its moments sufficient times to breathe. It doesn’t burn through everything in its deck with reckless abandon like some kid trying to pull off a Blasting The Ruins OTK. They bring riffs and sections back to let you bond with them over how damn catchy it is. I’m going to find my very best pair of Ruggers and stand at the barricade. I await my sacrifice to the elder god accordingly.

- Matt Lynch.