gob

The first punk band I got into was a band called 'gob'. Actually that's not true, as with most teens in the early-mid 90's, Green Day was my first punk band. Anyway, when I was in grade nine the band from Vancouver Canada had a video on rotation on MuchMusic (Canada's MTV) for a song called soda. The guys all looked like they were 16, played pretty fast pop-punk/skatepunk, and in the video were just seemingly going around on bikes, jumping off ramps at the end of a dock and into a lake (a line from the chorus is "I want to jump in a lake"...get it?) and eat bugs...



then they released another song off their second album (too late no friends) for "You're Too Cool", which had hockey in it, so of course its gonna be awesome! An unimportant fact about this song, is that this was the first cover my ridiculously semi-unpopular Grade 9-10 band 'Room 237' ever played at a coffee house...that is all.



Gob ended up having a pretty decent career in Canada in the late 90's and beyond. They released several albums after, all which were more polished then the previous effort, not a band thing - as their albums also sounded more varied. As much as I love 'too late no friends' it does get a tad repetitive over 20 songs, the majority of which are under a 1:30 long and fast as can be. My favorite album is 'How Far Shallow Takes You', in case you're wondering. Also, I really love their cover of the Rolling Stones 'Paint It Black' for the Stir of Echos movie (the kinda Kevin Bacon rip off of the Sixth Sense).



I kinda lost interest in them at one point after hearing the lead single from a new album, and honestly thinking it was the Foo Fighters. I'm a massive FF fan, but I was disappointed to find out that gob had changed so much from 'soda'. Nowadays, I listen to the same song and wonder what I was thinking, and actually like the song. Gob simply developed their song writing skills and grew up, nothing wrong with that. We just had a strained relationship for a bit, like friends in high school do...for some stupid reason (ie they sounded different to their old stuff, but not dissimilar to other stuff I really liked) we didn't talk anymore...dumb

In hindsight, you can really see how influential gob was to another pop-punk band from Canada, Sum 41. Be it the goofy sense of humour (see videos), and extremely catch punk songs that weren't cheesy or lame, amazing live show.... Sure enough one of the frontmen from gob joined Sum 41, and is currently doing both bands.

The following are several more videos from gob's career, thoughts?

B(flat) (1997)


What To Do (1998)


For The Moment (2001)


Give Up The Grudge (2003)


We're All Dying (2007)