Rouse – Gunfight (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Punk by any other name would smell as sweet. If you know what I mean. If you are one of those people who recognises that punk, like hip-hop, grunge and all those other game changing genres, was an attitude not a fashion, then you are also the sort of person who can spot that subversive creative urge wherever it crops up. If however punk means putting on your old leather jacket to watch 4 white guys with guitars do their best Clash impression then stop reading now.

 
If you embrace the more progressive and fluid definition of the concept then Gunfight is about as punk as it gets, it’s just that the chosen medium is a heavy, visceral and challenging brand of alternative dance music.

This is dance music built from the detritus found scattered across an industrial wasteland, all sharp edges and jagged design and driven by a relentless powerhouse of bruising beats and searing sparks. It is the white-hot groove of factory noise being rendered onto the night club floor, but not the night club that just anyone can find. This one is probably in a decaying warehouse or dead car plant miles away from civilization and possibly even in some sort of parallel universe, and as the clock strikes thirteen this is the sound which hits the sky for probably the last party before the apocalypse. How punk is that?