They took their sweet time, but Brainoil have finally unleashed the follow up to their 2002 debut. Their self titled debut was an intelligent mix of Eyehategod’s southern rock grooves, Buzzov*en’s coked up outbursts of speed and the Melvins off kilter riff structure and the result was a concise, straightforward album of pummeling grooves. Death of This Dry Season pulls back the crawling grooves and adds a heavy dose of grinding punk. While it doesn’t quite measure up to the first record, the songs simply aren’t as memorable as the self titled, the Oakland trio has released one of the most aggressive and violent sludge records of the year.
Whereas on the self titled they use speed to break up the sludge, here they use sludge to break up the speed. “Gravity is a Relic” summarizes their shift in sound nicely. It starts with the churn of early High on Fire, blows it out with some filthy punk, complete with classic punk lead work, and ends with some of their signature bottomed out sludge. Similarly, they mine more High on Fire on “Opaque Reflections” but end up on Terrorizer’s oil soaked shores as they unleash some blistering elder grind punk riffing and gruff vocals. There’s still plenty of down tempo murk (“The Beauty of Death”, “Death of This Dry Season”, “To Bury the Pages of Existence”), it’s simply overshadowed by the ripping speed.
So did they get punk in my sludge or sludge in my grind? Either way, this album rips. In keeping with the grindcore aesthetic of the music the album is only 25 minutes long and leaves a distinct feeling of “What the fuck just happened?” when it ends, like trying to remember your evening after waking up covered in broken glass and needle sores. It may lack the lumbering grooves of their self titled, but what it lacks in catchiness it makes up for with pure seething energy.
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this sounds pretty cool. I love nasty punk rock inspired stuff.
on Oct 4th, 2011 at 10:34OH DAMN.
on Oct 4th, 2011 at 10:35the title track here has what I call a “perfect-world breakdown.” as in “in a perfect world, all breakdowns would be like this. fuuuuuck.
on Oct 4th, 2011 at 10:37loved the debut, particularly fat groovy songs like “One Leaf Untouched” and “Lucid Vision.” I’ll be disappointed if they muddied that sound (as you suggest) but I’m still looking forward to hearing this.
on Oct 4th, 2011 at 10:54There’s some good grooves, they just don’t feel like the focus anymore. I loved the first album and so many of the grooves from it are permanently ingrained in my memory. I still regularly listen to it and it’s hard to see Death of this Dry Season having that kind of staying power. Still pretty awesome though, just different from their previous stuff.
on Oct 4th, 2011 at 12:43