Gozu Test the Patience of An Angry Man, Results Come Back Positive

So it’s the second date. First one was great – this quirky brunette made jokes you’d stowed ‘cause you worried about being impolite, and she referenced movies you hadn’t thought of in years. You mentioned wanting to try this new barbeque place downtown and she was totally game so here you both are, grinning over stripped bones and three knuckles deep in the best sauces you’ve ever tasted. The dinner crowd is clearing out, and you start to notice a pulsing rumble coming from the floor, traveling up the table legs and vibrating the emptied dishes. Your girl notices the restroom sign points down a staircase in the back and excuses herself. It’s ten minutes before you think fuck it and head down there yourself, and as the rumble resolves into amp-shaking chords and rump-shaking grooves, you notice your girl coiled on the arm of some hairy oldster guitarist pounding out the curly blues riffs. Her tongue’s in his ear, your tongue’s halfway down your own throat, you’re disgusted and dancing all at once. Gonna be a long night.

Boston’s Gozu play the tunes on their sophomore album with a pair of great grizzled gonads. We’re talking balls, people, some truly tremendous twin testes. The kind so deeply and scraggily forested that those epic ball-beards have epic ball-beards; the kind that require a high quality wide-angle lens to get any real perspective on. “Bald Bull” announces the record’s strutting, stonerific intentions from its opening burly buzz through every gristly melody and some sweet soloage. A pair of instrumentals follow, though they hardly suffer from the lack – Gozu rarely cops its charm from Marc Gaffney’s fitting but not especially standout vocals. “Salty Thumb” swings. “Disco Related Injury” melds metal tonality to rhinestone swagger; “Traci Lords” and “Ghost Wipe” tie same to a bit of radio bombast. Twenty-three-minute closer “The Ceaseless Thunder of Surf” links a series of solid ideas into a pretty great (if occasionally overly jammy) jam.

At times, The Fury of a Patient Man plays like a de-progged Mastodon after a dozen successful anger management sessions, or a laid back King Giant. The consistently competent delivery, the thick lowdown chords, dynamic proficiency and attention to density all point that direction. It’s the kind of heavy rock that just about anybody can enjoy over a few foamy brews in a hazy basement bar on a Saturday night. And when your date agrees to take the evening back to your place, you can even pretend she’s thinking of you the whole time.

The Fury of Patient Man is out now via Small Stone Records. Stream it in full and purchase it digitally or on CD via Small Stone’s Bandcamp.