Dead Brain Cells

Sticking with Canada, I find myself increasingly compelled to return to Dead Brain Cells’ (DBC) self titled debut recently. Despite still being active on the live circuit, their two album back catalogue lacks the revivalist gravitas of a Voivod or a Coroner. Their reputation remains somewhat obscured as a result. This, despite their second album being an ambitious concept piece covering no less than the entire history of the universe.

That being said, the debut itself remains a cornucopia of curiosities, talking points, and sheer novelty by the standards of thrash/crossover as it was at the time of its release in 1987. There are technical and progressive undertones, but they are deployed solely as a means to an end, that end being to create a dense, urgent, almost frayed duality of meaning. This element, along with lyrics concerned with power, conflict, and mental frailty amount to a compelling document of late Cold War malaise in a way that many of their thrash metal contemporaries never seemed quite capable of articulating.

These more nuanced aspects, along with a generous series of melodic vignettes dispersed throughout the album, are collided against the punk roots of the DBC formula, creating music both cerebral and primally urgent. Quiet contemplation remains the aspiration, one occasionally borne out via extended proto narratives as one idea is passed from riff to riff in memetic forms, before the delicate train of thought is utterly broken by chromatic, blasting chaos with no clear direction or target.

This interchange between the search for meaning beyond a polarised an apparently suicidal world order and the irresistible desire to lash out in formless destruction gets to the heart of where “pre-extreme” metal (for want of a better term) was by the late 80s. Forever attempting to usher the optimism of youth toward a constructive project, but unable to formulate what this might look like in a world increasingly dominated by the emergent neoliberal order and diminishing prospects for a collective escape from the nebulous power of financialisaton.

Originally published at Hate Meditations