***With previous releases on Total Punk, Drunken Sailor, and Neck Chop, many of you know Knowso. Maybe you’re even familiar with Cruelster and Perverts Again, projects that share members and sensibilities with Knowso. As for the rest of you, some percentage will hear fifteen seconds of Pulsating Gore and decide it’s not for you. (You’re missing out.) Knowso is too quirky, too nerdy… they don’t rock. But if you have a soft spot for angular rhythms, they’ll pull you in. From there, Pulsating Gore has layers to peel back. Its music is intricate, dense with notes delivered quickly and precisely, layered into interlocking patterns that brim with organic tension. The vocals are not really singing, but memorable nonetheless… a kind of purposefully forceful, yet emotionally detached incantation. And then there are the lyrics, which quick-cut between cryptic images, cracked and fragmented slogans, violent premonitions, and austere documentation of drudgery, words and phrases repeating as their meaning throbs in time with the music. Much of the imagery comes from singer / guitarist / bassist / artist Nathan Ward’s day job as a trucker: roads, highway stops, caffeinated beverages, gory accidents, etc. The images have a darkly psychedelic quality, relating to Nathan’s preoccupation with the ideal of reality “glitching,” a topic Knowso explores both musically and lyrically throughout the album. Also informing Pulsating Gore is Nathan’s intense but ultimately futile struggle to unionize his workplace, with many of the album’s lyrics reading as abstruse but biting analyses of work, labor, and capital....
LP $21.95
02/16/2024
***Cleveland's KNOWSO is another project from the PERVERTS AGAIN/ CRUELSTER camp and it's every bit as sardonic and demented as you've come to expect from these lads. Dark lumbering repetitive punk incantations driven along by tom heavy neanderthalic drums, chant heavy vocals, and shoulder shaking bass grooves. These boys have a penchant for off balance hardcore rumblings and KNOWSO is their newest platform in which to do so. 100% TOTAL PUNK!
7" $8.05
05/17/2019
***Hypnotic Smack is the new album from Knowso, the Cleveland punk duo featuring Nathan Ward (Cruelster, Perverts Again, the Carp) and Jayson Gerycz (Cloud Nothings). If you’ve heard Knowso’s music, you know they’re spiritual children of Devo, both in their proclivity toward dense and nervy rhythmic experimentation and in the way their lyrics turn a cracked, distorted mirror at the world and its many absurdities. Like the Fall’s best records, Hypnotic Smack attacks the body and the brain simultaneously, your hips jerking uncontrollably to the robotic pulse of “You Climb the Sphynx” and “Club Music is the Soundtrack” while your brain chews the koan-like cud of lyrical nuggets such as “every boss in America is a real estate agent.” Ward’s cryptic lyrics reflect the psychedelic labyrinth of horrors that is your daily doomscroll, but it’s OK… we can still dance the night away to “Panopticon,” the goth club dance anthem no one predicted Knowso would write. The world is full of punk bands that are great at pummeling you, but Hypnotic Smack is the rare punk record that beguiles and entrances.
LP $22.25
TBD