Hot Gum Hot Gum cassette
It sounds like the group had fun making this cassette, and this translates to a fun listen. (Note, it isn’t always the case that fun for the musicians results in fun for the listener.) However, HOT GUM sounds like a bunch of friends playing to see what they come up with. On the surface the result is in the current vogue, if occasionally cacophonous: jangled guitars and disco beats clash with staccato saxophone and spoken/sung vocals and you’re not sure where they’re going, then out of the chaos comes a fleeting gem of a chord progression, the right rhythm, the perfect sax squall, and all of a sudden everything makes sense. The lo-fi quality of the recording adds to the effect. Like listening to some of the live tracks from the CLEAN, you almost feel you’ve stumbled on something amazing that happened by accident, and someone happened to hit record at just the right time.