news
Sound Advice: Exhaustion 7″ by Creeper
Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.
Under normal circumstances, naming your band Creeper—the same band moniker as the fictional mullet rockers from FUBAR—would be considered a hoser sacrilege. But when you give’r as hard as these four GTA-based degenerates do on their latest 7” Exhaustion (out now on NCJT Records), such a transgression is easily forgiven.
Much like Montreal’s Black Ships and Maryland’s Surroundings, Creeper specialize in devastating burn-out hardcore. As such, Exhaustion is an apt title; the tunes here marry venomous hardcore songwriting tropes with the lethargic, lumbering sounds of sludge metal. Side A’s “Get a Grip” (streaming right) opens up with a convulsive 3/4 blitzkrieg before settling down into a slow, elephantine stomp. What’s evoked is a two-headed behemoth making its sluggish incursion into a helpless village; amps squeal, a bass rumbles, and guitars lurch dissonantly while vocalists Zach Van Horne and Colin Farquharson roar dark, bloody, and from the bowels.
Of course, Creeper’s no one-trick monster; Side B, which consists of two songs conjoined as one, sees stickman Leo Dubovitsky blow his technical load. “Sucker” starts off with a looming doom riff, only to explode into a merciless d-beat fusillade, intercut with stop-start dynamics, two-second non sequitur tempo changes and straight-up rock moments. “Deadbeat” more or less does the same—but on speed. Arsenic-dipped guitar carnage coalesces symbiotically with high-velocity, ADD-afflicted percussion—cymbals implode and drums tumble over each other as beats are turned inside out, outside in, upside down, and wrong side up. Things end off with more subsonic, slow-motion sludge; the ravening beast dog-tired after the havoc it’s wreaked.
Most recently, Creeper was thrown onto a four-way split tape released by DIY label A Mountain Far. Look for these hardcore carnivores to tour extensively this spring and summer. Also expect them to release a full length soon, but not too soon; they’re sort of tuckered out at the moment.