The Gobs: the best band you’ve never heard
The Gobs. It’s a moniker many a punk band since must have kicked themselves after: “Why didn’t I think of that?!”
Fans of underground garage at its most buzzingly lo-fi will no doubt see a nod to Michigan’s The Spits in such a hocker of an alias.
You wouldn’t be wrong. Borrowing the spiritual successor’s penchant for hooky as hell primitivism and turbo-spiked punk that barely ever clocks two minutes, The Gobs take such a formula and boil down the guitar attack to chunkier, dirgier, gnashes of alien murk.
Extraterrestrials are a theme. Ever since their first demo in 2021, a series of eye-popping covers has come to stand as The Gobs’ primary creative identity. Chiefly an almost episodic depiction of miscreant aliens indulging in all manner of tomfoolery, from enjoying a log flume ride or urinating on planet Earth, to sawing a hapless human being in half or sucking on a brain with a straw like an ice cream sundae.
Such zingy comic scrawls are the perfect smirking beckoners on Bandcamp, likely having pulled in the intrepid via their covers alone.
Any spin of The Gobs’ early demos wrought an intoxicating rush of ecto-punk splatter completely fogged by crushing compressions. Yet, as the tunes rolled out, slithering dimensions would rear their multiple heads. As collated on the 1-2-3-4 compilation of early EPs, the punk pummel could flash synth-slicked gleam on the roaring ‘2083 AD’, strut a little Ramones pop swagger on ‘Stuffed’, or even throw a triumphant fist in the air in the best Oi! tradition with the muscular ‘Action 52’.
Such a comic brew played out in The Gobs’ lyrics. Whatever was jumbling around their frontman’s psyche would spew out from behind the mic with haphazard idiosyncrasy, fighting your parents, mondo horror VHS, obsolete media, nuclear war, and a recurring motif of The Gob aliens committing a robbery and generally serving as a blight on all things decent.
So, who exactly are The Gobs? It started as a bedroom project of one ‘JJ Gobbington’ from Olympia, Washington, surging in the aftermath of eggy garage from Sydney, Australia’s Wartmann Inc cohort and the skewed punk bristling in Germany’s subterranean like Ex-White and Lassie.
The Gobs likewise orbited the explosion of cheap, four-track thrash coated in electronics, which flexed a weird kind of cartoonish, gelatinous snarl. The Aussie connection would pull JJ straight to Sydney, hanging out with kindred spirits Research Reactor Corp, Set-Top Box and Gee Tee, as well as lending his guitar heft to conjoined side-project 3D & The Holograms.
At some point, Gobbington headed back to the States, dropping 2024’s eponymous album and a plethora of EPs, including last year’s Obsgay Uleray. The formula’s stayed firm, all scrambled punk blast gunked in keyboard detritus, but operations have expanded to a surer live outfit with added on-stage guitar and drum trio, Gobbington handling bass while fronting the beefed-up Gobs.
Now a mainstay of the Seattle music underground, here’s hoping The Gobs continue to spit their twitch punk alien racket on the hapless West Coast and beyond.
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