gash's 'at least you know what you're laughing at' Cleans Up Just Enough to Stay Dangerous
The Sonic Breakdown
There’s a particular trap waiting for lo-fi bands who sign to a bigger label: the production gets competent and the songs get boring. gash walked straight past it. Logan Nyberg founded the project in California before moving back to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the band has since grown into a five-piece with Breckelle Bathke on vocals and keyboard. This is their first for Angel Tapes/Fire Talk, and it is cleaner than what came before in exactly the places where cleanliness helps.
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: “Holiday Time” is built on what The Quietus accurately called “an earworm of a bassline” — a looping, slightly impatient figure that the rest of the arrangement keeps deferring to. The springy guitars on that track sit above it rather than fighting it, which is a mixing decision as much as an arrangement one.
The Spatial Dynamics: The record keeps a deliberate amount of grit in the signal path. Guitars still fuzz at the top, and the drums retain a boxy, close-miked quality that a more polished mix would have opened out. Jacob Manieson put it well in The Quietus: “in spite of the tidying up of their production, it’s still not pristine.” That’s the whole balancing act, held steady across the album.
Standout Performance
Nyberg’s vocal, which plays the title’s joke straight — he delivers lines that could read as bitter with a shrug instead, and the shrug is funnier and sadder than emphasis would have been. “good and bad” and “Risking Heaven” both live or die on that tone, and they live.
Why It’s Certified
The Quietus heard a band levelling up without trading away identity, noting “a depth and sophistication” to tracks like “Holiday Time” and concluding that “it’s clear that Gash are thinking noticeably bigger.” “Data Master” is the proof of concept: a song with real structural ambition that still sounds like it was tracked by five people who find each other funny. Scaling up without smoothing out is harder than it looks, and gash make it sound like no effort at all.