Author: Rok Klemše
Interview date: 14.08.2008
Brutart is a band from Jesenice and Ljubljana that released their debut album, Mimic, last year. With its unique blend of death and doom metal, it’s one of the most original metal acts on our turf. Brutart were also one of the bands playing at this year’s Metal Mania, and we caught up with the band’s vocalist and guitarist Blaž Kelbl on the last day of the festival.
RockLine: You recently put out Mimic, and you said the reactions were pretty mixed, from very good to negative.
Blaž: Yeah, honestly, that was kind of to be expected. Right from the start we’ve never had broad approval, from the Arab Dream demo onward, and now with Mimic too. Brutart has never been a widely popular band, and it was never meant to be. The scene is just like that: it doesn’t often appreciate being different, people love generic bands, and the biggest parties are at cover bands anyway.
RockLine: Brutart is pretty demanding music anyway, it doesn’t hit you on the first try, you need some time to get into it.
Blaž: I don’t know, I don’t really have that listener’s perspective because I’m the one making it. We work like any other band: we write riffs and put them together. But we try to avoid stereotypical moves, even if they sometimes sound good.
RockLine: Most people label you a death/doom metal band. How would you describe Brutart if you had to?
Blaž: I don’t know, when we started we thought we were a gothic band, like Paradise Lost or Shades of God. Ten years have passed since then, and today gothic means Nightwish, and since then we’re supposedly doom. We sent some recordings to some doom webzine and they replied that they wouldn’t review us because we’re not doom. Still, we were tagged as doom right up until Mimic came out, which they now say is an old school death metal album, even though it’s a cross-section of four, five years of work. The songs on Mimic already existed back when we were recording Arab Dream in 2003. If I had to say, we’re (slow) death metal.
RockLine: Quite a lot of time passed between Arab Dream and Mimic. Why is that?
Blaž: We were making music the whole time, we just weren’t even thinking about an album. In between, the bassist left, then a guitarist came in, and we kept swapping around. I mentioned to Chop from On Parole whether he could set us up with a few gigs, and he made an album the condition, so we got down to recording one. We recorded it in two months and mixed it for almost a year. As a first record, Mimic has some birth defects, a bad sound, maybe it’s not homogeneous enough, since the songs are five years apart in age.
RockLine: Who did the unique design for Mimic?
Blaž: The drummer’s girlfriend. We always want to do something different, and already for Arab Dream we asked a designer friend. For Mimic we racked our brains over what to do, and the drummer’s girlfriend has a knack for it. The basic idea was settled: it should look like a book. The core concept of Mimic is that we all imitate the exterior, while people’s insides stay hidden, revealed to no one, and true human nature is hidden even from ourselves. Everything else is adapting to your surroundings, even I, at 29, still keep a ponytail (laughs). The artist’s name is Vesna Rodman, and she drew all the sketches. What I like is precisely that the sketches are drawn “badly,” by hand, first take. There are no design rules, because it’s Brutart, raw art.
RockLine: That fits the whole Brutart/art brut concept, right?
Blaž: Yeah, also, though we’re really picky about some things, like where a cymbal goes…
RockLine: Sounds about right, the drummer’s an animal…
Blaž: Yeah, sometimes you have to hold him back, and we’re going to do it even more. When we were mixing we realized there were cymbals everywhere. We all come from different musical streams. I listened to post-punk for a long time…
RockLine: Joy Division?
Blaž: Yeah, of course. Arab Dream is basically a Joy Division tribute with a cover. Guitarist Andrej is a pure death metaller, the drummer’s a goth, and let’s not even talk about the bassist (laughs). But the mix somehow works, the band is slowly taking shape. On Mimic the influences are still fragmented, the songs are quite different, from progressive to death metal. What we’ve been writing since it came out is shaping into a more homogeneous style.
RockLine: Have you been a musician for a long time?
Blaž: The guitarist and I had a band before, Human Agony, with a similar sound to Brutart. Brutart is actually the first time I’ve done this more seriously.
RockLine: I ask because I feel like you have excellent stage charisma.
Blaž: I hear the exact opposite. We in Brutart are static, we’re dead on stage, the music’s good, but not for listening to on stage, rather at home… and then nobody buys the CD. When we started I always had stage fright, I was always shaking. We had insane ambitions, like every band. We’ll have a few rehearsals, record a demo, send it to a label, get signed and play gigs. Thank God that didn’t happen. Now we’re old geezers and we just show up and play. We’ll make music passionately, but not professionally. We could churn out generic metal riffs for six records, but it’s not about stressing out over it, and maybe that’s why the performance is more confident. Because, basically, I just don’t give a damn.
RockLine: But Mimic has some phenomenal lines that really hit you, e.g. “Father I’m Sorry”…
Blaž: Yeah, but those aren’t my vocals (laughs). That’s the drummer, that’s actually my fake credit. Live I do the singing, but the drummer is an excellent singer. He sang in our earlier bands too, but we decided he’s better off drumming, and I think he still has huge potential. He’s untameable, which is good on one hand and not on the other. Drummers like to go “show what you’ve got.”
RockLine: The lyrics on Mimic deal with the human psyche and morality. Is that also why you sang verses by Edgar Allan Poe on Arab Dream?
Blaž: Nah, there’s no deeper story. For Israfel we had Arab Dream as a partial title, the drummer wrote the lyrics, but they weren’t good. A friend suggested Poe, we tried it, and it’s actually an excellent lyric for music. There’s no big message in how we got there.
RockLine: So what’s the future for Brutart? Just the standard closing question.
Blaž: I think the future is good, the lineup has finally settled, and we’ve finally started making music again, which we’d forgotten how to do because we were mixing for so long, had no rehearsals, or only rehearsed for gigs. We’ve got two songs in the works, and in two years there may be another record. That’s it. Thanks for the interview.
RockLine: Thank you!
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Text: Rok Klemše
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