Wealth Gap Debt Before Dishonor cassette
Melodic hardcore from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Eleven songs of toe-tapping, catchy, driving hardcore. My big question is about the band’s self-proclamation of being “groove punk.” What in the fuck is groove punk? If you mentioned that term to me, I would assume you were talking about bands like MENTAL or RIGHTEOUS JAMS, who I frankly couldn’t stand in the first place. That style always just sounded like some clean-cut jock hardcore that had no business even claiming to be punk. So, if WEALTH GAP is a “groove punk” band, would that make RIGHTEOUS JAMS a proto-groove punk band? Or if we’re retroactively making up genre terms for bands from the past, can we take punk away from their genres, leaving them with groove hardcore, or perhaps groove-core? Holy hell, these sound awful. There are a lot of aspects I like about WEALTH GAP. They might make some decisions in their songwriting that I wouldn’t make, but there are undeniably some very cool moments in their recording, like the spooky beginning of “Imperial Cereal,” or that wildly catchy guitar lick in “Makes Me Sick.” I don’t think we need new genre names to describe the tried-and-true styles we all play. We just need to stop letting people get away with co-opting the already established terms and allowing words like “punk” and “hardcore” to be so indiscriminately applied to any kind of guitar music. I, for one, will be calling it like I see it: WEALTH GAP is a pretty cool small-town hardcore band.