Sunday, November 6, 2011

Sunday Sludge - Brachiosauride


Depending on your lifestyle, Sunday mornings can either be a snooze, a breeze, or perhaps a total drag. Luckily for all of us, the technology exists to ensure bands like Brachiosauride are accessible enough to nurse our regrets with their unique meld of progressive sludge and experimental noise.

Brachiosauride's Excavations marks the band's first studio album and paints this foursome as lumbering giants coursing through a garden of crumbling statues. Whether it's fuzz, grind, crunch, or blistering thrash, these guys craft an impressive contribution to darkness. The ten tracks shift, burn, bellow, and bury expectations through 37 minutes of metal that you'll wanna honor with an encore. There's just so much to hear, you'll be chewing on this album longer than your grandmother's breakfast.

Opening with a beaten buzz on At the Cracks of Void, tempos quickly warp and boil down to an incredible contribution to a lost city of unsettling guitar solos. Frayed ends somehow manage to meet, mend, and creep through a hazy passage that showcases Brachiosauride's melted musicianship. It's a staggering introduction to a band that promises to keep knocking you on your ass.

Summon the Speechless enters, heavy with doom and coated with mange in its pelt. This is where we rub sludge on our gums and feel a fire in our belly. Rhythm builds and pours into a spooky guitar hover on Arrow of Time, a blistering metal assault that cements the album's concept, described by the band as taking our protagonist to "the ultimate ground of surrealism." The sound keeps getting progressively thicker and parallels a story most metal bands don't have the patience for.

Things drown and lose their bearings on The Burning Giraffe, a mindfuck of shred and tar. Just when you thought things would start making sense, Brachiosauride grab you by the hair and pull you into the rusty, rain-soaked Horizon of the Black Sun. You weren't expecting them to hit us with a somber interlude, but the track is more than that anyway. And leading into the skull-splitting Credence Corruption, you'll thank the band for relenting just a bit. A dude's gotta breathe, after all.

Excavations brings a hum thump like Black Cobra, a guitar scorch like Marty Friedman, and a doom and gloom mood like the jaded old man next door who yells at your kids. The journey this album illuminates (or dims) is exhausting, cumbersome, fresh, and enlightening. From the sludge roll of Summon the Speechless and The Crawling Chaos to the serene acceptance of Horizon of the Black Sun and Birds and Spirits, listeners acquaint themselves with a band that seemingly does it all.

Brachiosauride have made Excavations available (for free, no less!) through every imaginable avenue, all of which can be found on their website listed below. Do yourself a favor and listen to this album at home, in your car, at work, and everywhere in-between. Make sure it's loud and make sure you pay attention. Experience it, dissect it, and try putting the pieces back together. And good luck staying on your feet.

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