Brache

RABM is one of those "scenes" within black metal that received quite a bit of upwind in the past couple of years with many artists starting to openly oppose the almost omnipresent NS bullshit, a trend that I really appreciate. Some keep it to a few sentences in interviews, others yell at nazis on their gigs or even implement statements in their music and others openly support antifascist movements at every step. Brache falls into the last category, but also implements loads of other left-leaning ideas and concepts into their music. I mean, what's more depressing and grim than capitalism? Fittingly the band went full DIY and released their self-titled and self-recorded full-length from 2016 on second-hand tapes.

Musically, the band seems to continue this thought and provides raw, muddy black metal that was apparently recorded in their rehearsal room and the bedroom of one of the three members. Additionally, I doubt there was a lot of time wasted on producing the album in order to truly capture the essence of the moment and to keep the punk/lo-fi spirit alive. Hence everything kind of blurs into each other and while you can still make out a fair share of the individual instruments, the record feels really dense and muddy. Musically, the three guys from Hesse are offering posty dsbm in a rather blunt and generic way. A fuzzy wall of guitars is providing some monotonous riffing that occasionally receives a bit of variation while the drums are blasting on a constantly high level. The atmosphere is dense yet aggressive, the posty undertones on the guitars are adding a lot to the mood and the faint, reverb-laden screams make for cold and depressed addition.

Each of the four tracks feels kind of the same and there's not much of variation going on. There are a few slower sections here and there as well as the ambient interludes between the songs, but the rest is mostly the same kind of depressive, monotonous riffing, barely noticeable and weak drumming and whiny yelling with no ups or downs. Despite all the downsides, I gotta admit that the mood and atmosphere of the record is pretty energetic and captivating. The rare outbreaks of melodic undertones within the riffing are also pretty neatly implemented the guys' performances are pretty on point. Rarely did I notice uneven transitions or other failures that could interrupt the intensity of the music.

The only things that didn't really work out are the really rough, unfinished and lazy production and the calm posty wandering that takes place in "Genese". It feels really out of place and is doing more for getting the band's political views across than adding something to the quality of the release. Aside from that Brache's self-titled record is a neat little background album for lovers of post-black and dsbm that doesn't have anything to set it apart from other bands, but is competent enough to keep the listener's attention for more than a few minutes and also happens to have a neat little atmosphere going on. By the way, the remixed version of this didn't affect any aspect of the album, really.