Brave Murder Day

It is not very surprising that I ran into this record during a phase where I used to hunt for doom death and progressive death like sound, anything in the lines of Opeth, My Dying Bride and Moonsorrow would have pleased me a lot. I do believe that Mikael Åkerfeldt has one of the well rounded and deep growls i have heard in death metal and one day just like that i realized that he has done vocals for another band from Sweden called Katatonia, this triggered me to give a listen to Brave Murder Day.

The band sounded nothing like Opeth, they were more dampened a tad more depressing and much more weary. Even Åkerfeldt sounded different, very different, the growls were not as deep as i would have expected, either I saw a new versatile facet to his vocal abilities or it was just the effect of production. The intensely deep growls were toned down and replaced with more lengthy dry sound which lies somewhere between a scream and growl, definitely tending towards the growling end of the spectrum. The shift in vocal style mirrors the compositions which are not like adrenaline pumping aggressive assaults of riffage but dragged out and slowed down dreary riffs which monotonously resonates and lazily shifts its pace and the flow, quite contrasting to the progressive death style.

The whole record could be split into two halves, each having its own feel, the first two songs “Brave” and “Murder” perfectly fits the description given in the above paragraph about sluggish compositions, really gloomy and creates an ambiance of drizzling and cloudy mornings. The more sinister feel is subdued till we hit the second half of the record. “Day” is a very slow track with clean vocals which bridges the two contrasting halves of the Brave Murder Day. The point where “Rainroom” starts you realize that the record is moving in a slightly more aggressive direction, the growls are literally unleashed; they are more on the face and louder. The drums get more prominent, in some parts the incessant double bass pounding is heard quite noticeably, sometimes interleaved with slow guitar strumming, growls and leads. “Rainroom” is quite refreshing, heavy and probably the best track of the record, the constant background guitar strumming fills all the crevices and makes the sound sufficiently dense. Couple of minutes into the song and the heaviness withers down a bit but it is more than compensated by the pain invoking extreme vocals, the song slowly build up the lost momentum which runs into some brilliant vocal parts culminating in drums tailored for head banging. “Rainroom is just the kind of song which makes an album rise above its own deserving quality rating and makes it move into a must listen record category in its genre. When the song tapers off to an end everything seem to pale in comparison to the reverberating Åkerfeldt growls of “I saw it end long before it ended, Life itself turned pale and ended”.

“12” starts of slowly and halfway into the song it truly shifts its style in sync with the essence of Brave Murder Day, the heavy rhythm guitar parts with growls are interleaved with clean guitar strumming and slow drums. This pattern is followed throughout the second half till the end where the sound gets really slow and tends to the funereal side of doom, the slow guitar and the growling vocals are a tad too slow for the progressive death fans. “Endtime” too starts off with slow lead guitars which shifts to old school heavy metal rhythm sound and again goes back to clean guitar leading up to a more heavier sound. It hardly matters how this last song goes, by this time the listener would have either got into the “Brave Murder Day” or would have trashed it by now. The song ends with this constant drumming, real crude typical deathly vocals ending with clean guitar and stops abruptly as if someone just snapped the power cord.

The lyrics are nightmarish, surreal and disheartening, very much blends with the style of music and Åkerfeldt does complete justice to the composer, lyricist and the production crew with his point blank blasts of growling which takes the listener to ethereal depths of doom. As the record progresses his vocals also evolve with the compositions and towards the end the depth in the growls get more and more audible. Renkse’s style of writing in this record is a bit quirky, the lyrics seem like bundled up lines, as if some connecting words went missing, as if the order of lines all got jumbled up. All this idiosyncrasies and the words just work fine, it screams of pain all the way, I love the fact that he never went overboard by needlessly trying to rhyme or by trying to do “poetic justice” to the album. The record reeks of crudeness and pain in lyrics, of dreary hopelessness in compositions and of grim pale growls in vocals, all of this concocts up wonders when Brave Murder Day is played on a drizzling Sunday morning backed with sufficient quantities of alcohol which will eventually transpire into a beautifully wasted day.