Brutus
Slachtbeest
7.7
One of the slightly less cerebral stressers on Unique Leader, Brutus come barreling through your speakers with enormous bottom-end production, ruthless blast beats, pulping double-kick, and some severe clinical detuned guitar syndrome. These are some extremely low and heavy guitar blasts here. Think Hemdale’s tuning. The drum sound Brutus has achieved is amazing. The kick is huge and a good balance between completely natural and slightly triggered. The low end guitar tone sounds like human belching. The chords are like an earthquake from the depths of the earth’s core. I simply love the production on this album.
The songwriting formula this band employs is not that of Spawn of Possession or Severed Savior; they don’t carve you to crumbs with mind-blowing technikill riffing or race you taking off 300mph from the starting line. They stabilize themselves w/ the heaviness of an oil tanker anchor and actually inject brutal death melodies. Don’t worry, they’re not the castrated melodies of power metal or the powerless powder-puff bullshit of Swedish melodic metal. They are infectious infestations of classic death riffing w/ that monster open top string swinging in every so often & the artificial harmonics that brutal death goons require.
When I play Slachtbeest, the disc goes from track 1 to 10 w/ no interruption. I don’t want to skip the one it’s on, yet I don’t want to repeat it again because I know the next one got a killer swing groove in it. Brutus is Dutch brewtill death, and along w/ their beastly bottom end, they have these European sounding melodies and riffs throughout their songs. Maybe it’s just a matter of perceptual set for me or maybe it’s not. But I do know this: Brutus defines what guttural brutal death really is, and all of their songs are standout from one another. They don’t fall victim to monotonous chugging and sloppy belching like so fucking many amateur BROOTAL SICK GUTTURAL GORE DEATH bands do.
Once again, Unique Leader finds the REAL shit in an ocean of imposter semi-digested diarrhetic by-product. Slachtbeest is fun as hell to listen to, it’s energetic, it’s powerful, it’s devastatingly heavy, and it’s very well produced. This year’s best of list has been almost completely dominated by UL releases, and I see no reason why Brutus will be any different.
