NEW REVIEWS!
Shredding Paper
Straight outta Chico, this be superior snarling DIY punk with screaming female vocals and Blatz (both band and beer) running through their bloodstream. All inall good music to Fuck Shit Up by and more proof (as if it were still needed) that there's still signs of intelligent (if not always sober) life in the twilight world of DIY punk. By David.
Maximum Rock'n'Roll #245 October 2003
V/A "The Suburban American Tract home Project, Vol. 2" CD
A 23 song collection of Chico, California bands? It's hard to tell because the booklet's shitty fonts are so blurry much of it's indecipherable. It's too bad, 'cause it looks like a lot of work thought and money went into the 16 page booklet. The bands are all over the musical maps is the sound quality. None of the bands really jump out at me. GRUK, SLAG, P.A.W.N.S., ACCIDENTS, SMEAT and eight others chime in with at least one track. REPEAT OFFENDERS do a DEAD BOYS cover with most CD comps, it's a mixed bag at best, maybe functioning as a scene document. Can't say I would recommend this to anyone (RR).
OUCH !
V/A "The Suburban American Tract Home Project Vol.3" CD
26 song compilation of Chico hardcore punk bands all raw, fast adn pissed off punk with not really an ounce of wimpy pop punk for miles around. Highlights for me are PUSH BUTTON WARFARE, GRUK, STANDFAST (yeah they're melodic but by no means are they pop punk) and KIDS WITH HEALICE. Nice document of this Central Valley scene. (MT)
Local Chico music rag The Synthesis has a little page on Gruk with several show reviews.
Here's a brief mention of Gruk and our friends Barefoot Army and Nogoodnix in a recent "Ransom Notes" column by Profits frontwoman Erika Ransom (published in Maximumrocknroll #244, Sept. 2003).
Punknews.org review of the BFA/Gruk split CDr by Joe:
Barefoot Army / Gruk - The Shittier Split
Free Abortions - 2003
Well for the past few years the music world has been plauged with mostly pre-fabricated bullshit, seemingly all you have to do these days to be considered good is whine about something over poppy power chords.
This CD, thankfully, has nothing of that.
Truly a great release from two Northern California bands. Featuring 3 songs from Barefoot Army and 7 from Gruk(3 of them live). Both bands play distinctive music, a mix of thrash, hardcore and crust. Another thing that makes this album different from others, is the female vocals, not that I'm saying female vocals are any better than male vocals they just both work very well with the music.
The best songs on here are "Rolls Royce" by Gruk and "Madcowboy Disease" by BFA. "Madcowboy Disease" is defenitley different from the rest of the album, its a sing-a-long, anti-war/anti-Bush song. It doesn't really sound like anything you'd expect but it's still a really good song. Anyway, you should check out this split, you'll probably like it if you're into anything good, really. You could order it from BAREFOOTARMY.CJB.NET (Click on the links and choose the record label one).
Well to sum this all up, the CD's good, has two bands, ten songs, its cheap (price, not quality, its good quality) ,and comes with a cool case. By the way Barefoot Army has broken up, and if you want to hear some of their songs before you buy this, you could download some at their website.
Maximumrocknroll #244, Sept. 2003:
STRAIGHTEDGE KEGGER/GRUK - split EP
STRAIGHTEDGE KEGGER... heh... Anyway, finger-pointing, hardline youth crew from Fresno, CA, with awesome production values and many a moshable breakdown at just the right point. Just kidding. This is female-fronted, pissed off, fast, rudimentary thrash with stoned, goofy lyrics. They kind of remind me of the recent DISREANTIYOUTHHELLBASTARDASSMANX EP. GRUK, on the flip, are from Chico, CA, and are equally pissed off and also female fronted. They do a great cover of NEGATIVE APPROACH and that is a great description of their sound and style. Get this for the GRUK side for sure. (WM)
The famous, epic Maximumrocknroll review (#240, May 2003) of the Gruk "s/t" CD:
GRUK - CD.
GRUK does hardcore in such a way that will blast-beat your heart out. Similar to other Chico bands like the PAWNS, Rachel's vocals definitely make you want to dance in a circle looking tough. (MM)
TA-DAAAAAA!!!
Gruk, Gruk (Gruk)
Gruk. You know what I love about the original wave of harDCore bands, esp Minor Threat (of course)? They managed to sound utterly unmendiated, like what they were doing was an absolutely pure upwelling of what they were. (Of course, that has to be in some ways a delusion: they did not entirely invent their own vocabulary.) But that has been missing to a large extent in hardcore ever since, and is missing now. In fact, hardcore is about achieving that immediacy, but precisely in its devotion to that moment it makes that moment impossible to itself. Hardocre is a style of music, and you're trying to play in that style. It's a style that tries to find primal immediacy, and so you try to find primal immediacy. And at this point you are reverting to a vocabulary that is twenty years old, through various strata of performers and performances. See? the consciousness with which you're trying to get primal makes the primal impossible. You're losing what you're pursuing precisely in virtue of pursuing it. Enough lecture. Gruk, a band from Chico, CA, somehow takes me back to DC, 1980. They obviously like Minot Threat, but by the same token they're not just out here imitating or emulating MT. They play with melody and snarl, intelligence and ferocity. And somehow, they just come off sounding straight up: like it's coming straight from the gut. Cool to have a girl singing hardcore, too, and she does it damn well.
935 w. 4th ave. #17. chico, ca 95926. gruk@blackvault.com
(Review by Crispin Sartwell)
Here's what DS-13's Christoffer 138 had to say about us in the DS-13 tour diary from Maximumrocknroll # 227, April 2002:
Wednesday 3rd: Today one of those rare events occurred, when you get your ass kicked without any expectations. We pull up to the venue in Chico, Ca pretty late after getting some deligious vegan grub at a local joint. The first band was already started. And boy, do they blow us away or what!? It's a young teenage band called Gruk, dishing out some supreme hardcorepunk. Felix says they've stolen pretty much everything from Blatz and Filth, but I don't really care since i've never been into those bands. Gruk is fronted by an awesome female singer, who combines a lot of attitude and drunken chaos to form a killer front woman. They end with a bodacious rendition of Danzing's "Mother"...