Author: Rok Klemše
Artist: Brutart
Label: On Parole Productions
Release: year_month
Runtime: 44:27
Rating: 4/5
Upper Carniolan death/doom force Brutart carved a place in the DNA of Slovenian metal with its well-received studio debut Mimic, which came out a full ten years ago. Back then the band was busily racking up gig mileage, but then its activity slowly dried up and went quiet. That lasted right up until this April, when the news practically came out of nowhere that Brutart are back among the living, and that the new album isn’t just in the works but fully recorded and ready for release.
Wear My Skin makes it clear from the first notes that it’s the logical successor to Mimic, and not once do Brutart show any signs of rust. Still, the skin we put on this time is prettier and shinier, though not thanks to cosmetics. No, Brutart’s skin is the skin of someone who has just died, losing color and life and taking on a gray, colorless patina. That morbidity, gloom and sense of loss permeates all forty-five minutes of the album, which makes it a pretty hefty sonic mouthful of death and doom metal, in places sludge, and in places spiced up with the melancholy of grunge and post-punk.
Where Mimic often had Brutart channeling the Dutch Gorefest, on Wear My Skin they sound far more like themselves, partly thanks to a much more polished sound than on the debut. The foundation is still heavy, massive guitar riffs, complex broken rhythms, a crushing rhythm section and brutal vocals trapped in the agony of loss. Once again the duo of Blaž Kelbl and Sebastjan Mulej have created a varied vocal dynamic that wraps the listener in a menacing, nihilistic atmosphere, with retching vocals that are even more brutal and deeper than on the predecessor. All of this is built up further by female vocals, whispers and spoken parts that sound like Vincent Price reciting the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.
The vocal monotony that plagued the debut is gone, and the same goes for the songs themselves. Where the debut’s tracks could come off monotonous because of their overly similar structures, this time they’re far more worked out, thought through and varied. Although they’re still mostly ruled by the relative slowness and massiveness of doom, faster riffs, effective melodies and tricks you’d sooner find in other genres than in death/doom pop up in all the right places to spice things up. That’s mainly why the debut’s biggest flaw is fixed – tracks that never lodged themselves in your (long-term) memory. This time, tracks like Dolores, Hollow Heights, Dirty Creatures, Suffer In Silence and Children For Despair creep into your nightmares much more often.
Wear My Skin is no easy listen, mainly because of the bleakness of the thread of loss running through the album, which is also superbly translated into musical form. But there’s beauty and aesthetics hidden even in the ugly, and the skin the listener puts on with the new Brutart album is, in theme and substance, not a bad match for Patrick Süskind’s Perfume.
Line-up
Blaž Kelbl – vocals, guitar
Erik Orson – guitar
Sebastjan Mulej – drums, vocals
Roman Štupar – bass
Production
Brutart
Tracklist
1. Evil Eve
2. Monodark
3. Dolores
4. The World at the End of the Light
5. Misanthropy
6. Hollow Heights
7. Dirty Creatures
8. Devil’s Thrill
9. Suffer in Silence
10. Bearing the Unbearable
11. Children for Despair
