Brain Drill leave you in little doubt as to what you’re about to experience. At bottom-right, against sleeve art depicting a city being showered with meteorites while the undead chew away the flesh of the recently deceased, lies the album title: Apocalyptic Feasting.
The song titles continue in a similar vein. “Consumed By The Dead”, perhaps, or “Sadistic Abductive” … or how about that memorable little ditty “Force Fed Human Sh*t”?
There are, unsurprisingly, no ballads or slow songs.
Quite literally, in fact. Brain Drill are coming from the extreme and hyper-technical end of the gore metal spectrum, and if I’ve ever heard any band who play this fast before, the post-traumatic stress has blotted it from my memory.
I can’t begin to imagine how many hours of relentless training and practice must have been put into reaching the inhuman speed of Apocalyptic Feasting. Machine-gun snare drum strikes embed themselves in your eardrums like splinters of bone, reinforced by swarms of muted chords and flurries of guitar notes that sound like synthesizer patches because your brain can’t separate the notes from one another at the rate they’re passing by.
To contrast this relentless barrage, Brain Drill occasionally deploy diminished minor solos and sinister Wagnerian Teutonic melodies to march across the top at half-speed. All the while, guttural bellows and tortured shrieks that even Dante himself might consider slightly overstated intone the news of our grim unpleasant fates.
It’s all a bit too much, really. Don’t get me wrong – I understand the rationale behind death metal aesthetics, and I’m not suggesting that Brain Drill take their material any more seriously than Peter Jackson took his early movies. But Apocalyptic Feasting seems to be about everything being turned up to eleven simply for the sake of it – music and imagery alike.
There’s no denying that the technical musical aptitude in Brain Drill as a group probably equals or betters the combined total of any three other bands – the sheer velocity of their music must make every live show an endurance test for their limbs.
The corollary is that there’s no subtlety, no sense of dynamic movement. The only respite you get from the aural assault of Apocalyptic Feasting are the gaps between tracks, and once the initial shock has worn off, all those tracks all sound remarkably similar.
Of course, that could be the result of unfamiliarity with these high-velocity forms of music; maybe if you’re more accustomed to the style, you can pick out the differences and subtleties between the tunes on albums like Apocalyptic Feasting.
I can’t see myself putting the effort in, personally – as much as I’m in awe (and a degree of envy) at Brain Drill’s musicianship, I’d far rather listen to something with a bit more to say. As impressive as it may be, I guess Apocalyptic Feasting is an acquired taste.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: death metal, extreme metal, gore metal
