Wow. I wasn’t expecting this from Gas Huffer at all. It’s like they took the trashy rock’n’roll that made them famous and threw out the trash. Not in a bad way at all. This is the musical equivalent to the whole Pygmalion fantasy, where you take a hooker, clean her up and make her presentable to all your friends and everyone loves her and she’s a great girlfriend, etc., but deep down inside, you know she still fucks like a pro and you’ll never have to lose that. It just makes sense, though, that, when you have this much talent swimming around beneath the distortion, you should probably drain a bit of the distortion out of the pool. And that’s what The Rest of Us does. Everything about Gas Huffer is solid in this album: a sturdy rhythm section, catchy vocals, and good lyrics (“the kids are listening to the radio. They can’t tell the songs from the ads, but who can these days?”). But what makes this album amazing is Tom Price’s guitar. Without any kind of wanking or showboating, Price rounds out the songs with perfect sounding riffs. Every time I listen to this album, one of Price’s guitar parts will jump out at me and I’ll think, how the fuck did he do that with only six strings? I’ll think, people have been playing guitars for hundreds of years, why hasn’t anyone else thought to do that? And that? And that? It’s not just impressive; it’s great music.
–sean (Estrus)