EP REVIEW: Brut! – Borts Minorts + Hug Victim
Neither BORTS MINORTS nor HUG VICTIM are likely to be known by name by most people on these shores – HUG VICTIM being the pseudonym on this release (and a song from his 2019 release The Death Of Fantasy) of Timo Ellis – but they are very much two veterans of weird, both self-proclaimed and otherwise, as judged by this particular project. With three tracks under a minute and two only just above out of the eight on the release, this is not something for the faint of heart. The length, however, disguises just how much creativity has gone into forming something so imperfect in terms of conventional sound yet still somehow coherent in all of its musical madness.
It’s not often you will get nuances of both dirge noise and 80s easy listening in the same track and form any level of coherence, yet these two masters of their chosen areas somehow manage to do just that in their latest single, Horned God (Give Me The Strength), while at the same time taking what feels like jazz drumming and keys – from very different songs – before blending them into a mixer alongside commercials and 80s toy sounds for the other pre-EP release single, Fuckball Johnson.
The only other track over two minutes, Doggies, feels like an awful acid trip take of the Oompa Loompa song from Charlie And The Chocolate Factory merged into an alien signal received through an antenna, with the end result somehow managing to be palatable to a certain music taste, despite the system shock it insists on giving along the way. A clear demonstration of just how close to the madness MINORTS and Ellis truly are in their musical vision.
It feels in some way punishing, yet somehow still very rewarding. It may seem like there are negatives listed but this is only intended to show quite how difficult a listen it can be. It is certainly aimed at a very niche audience as there is likely no mainstream appeal in any of the songs, such are the levels of discordance and the jarring nature of the song creation in this release, yet there’s something that just keeps reeling you back in every single time it feels that it may become too much.
This EP will batter at your conscious mind in a way that relents just before it feels like it could actually be painful for your psyche but leaves a lasting impression in its rather novel manner of adapting the loud/soft sound we saw in the likes of THE PIXIES and early REM in the 80s and transforming it into something that has quite an alien approach to that concept, taking it ad absurdum yet somehow managing to just tread that fine line between genius and delusion without jumping too far beyond it. It is something utterly different from anything else you will likely hear this year but it fully deserves the several listens it may take to fully appreciate just how well orchestrated the Brut! EP is.
Rating: 8/10
Brut! is set for release on February 25th via Nefarious Industries.
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