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Across 10 songs and a handful of instrumentals, Melbourne's GELD demonstrate a concerted progression from their previous work; raging incendiary hardcore collides with nightmarish bad trip wanderings in a swirling maelstrom of tightly marshaled chaos. The fast parts are faster, the slow parts slower, the weird parts weirder. The vicious thrashing punk of songs like "Invader" and "Infra" come in at a little over a minute; a wild joyride reminiscent of the Japanese Burning Spirits bands alongside Cleveland’s infamous ‘90s hardcore scene. Meandering hallucinogenic badness meanwhile emanates from "Gedankenfleisch", "Forces At Work" and "L.O.W.A.G. II", injecting the record with a terrifying sense of drug paranoia and psychological dissolution bringing to mind STICKMEN WITH RAYGUNS, FLIPPER or POISON IDEA. Purportedly undertaken as something of an exorcism, the writing and recording of ‘Beyond The Floor’ was characterized by “pills, meth, booze, weed, DMT, hate, betrayal, fear, love, depression, addiction, denial and broken bones”.
Our take: I loved Geld’s last LP, Perfect Texture, and if you’re in that same camp, check out Beyond the Floor because it takes everything I loved about Perfect Texture and pushes it just a little further. I’ve always been a sucker for bands that combine hardcore with dense and punishing noise rock, and there’s a lot of that on Beyond the Floor, though I also hear elements of stomping, mid-paced black metal on tracks like “Infrasound.” Double Negative was a band with a similar set of influences, and there are moments on Beyond the Floor (particularly “Nocturnal Hand” and “Red Mist,” the frantic one-two punch that opens the b-side) that sound uncannily like early Double Negative. Geld travels much further into the damp caves of noise rock, though, with a handful of tracks breaking the three-minute barrier, making space for psychedelic jamming and droning that causes the hardcore to hit that much harder. Beyond the Floor is a dense LP with rich, velvety sonic textures throughout. Sometimes my ear gets lost in those textures, while sometimes I let the rhythms pound me in the gut. It’s like a hardcore version of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel! Seriously, though, if you like your hardcore heavy, noisy, and a little bit arty, you can’t go wrong with this LP.