“Deafkids will ruin everybody’s hearing at Roadburn 2019, and Petbrick will help”
The above was found proudly sported on the Roadburn website, alluding to not only the sheer waves of racket that both groups happily oblige in, but also the seeds of their collaboration to come. On Deafbrick, Brazilian acid-noise-punk trio Deafkids have found themselves joining arms with Petbrick, respectively made up of producer Wayne Adams (Big Lad/Death Pedals) and Iggor Cavalera, most notable as the founding drummer of Brazilian metal legends Sepultura.
Brazil finds itself not only being the home for a majority of the musicians involved in the record, but having its rich, percussion-driven style of music injected into the the sound, right off the bat, with the introductory track, “Primeval I.” Bookended by some heavy, fuzz-driven psychedelic chord swells, the ambient calm before the storm is soon interrupted by the blisteringly fast synched guitar and percussion on “Força Bruta,” which goes by way quicker than expected.
“Sweat-Drenched Wreck” is really where people can hear the noise element of the entire album start to come through. Albeit a collaborative effort and most definitely mixed together superbly, one may not be able to hear where each band holds suit the absolute most, with this track being highlighted by the tremendously dirty bass guitar tone, as well as the obvious stabs of noise towards the end. This style of song, shown on the previous track as well, crosses over to other tracks such as “Máquina Obssessivo-Compulsiva,” although with far less electronic and IDM elements, favoring good old-fashioned heavy noise, sounding extremely similar to Dylan Walker’s Full of Hell written brand of disgusting vocals and post-production.
In between the two aforementioned songs, of course, is the continuation of electronic flavorings over a slow crescendo of an extremely eerie ambient pad and some tribal percussion, only made perfect by the distorted guitar and reverberated spoken-word vocals, reminding some how much they all miss Type O Negative. Quite unfortunately, however, one finds that a song like such on “The Menace of the Dark Polar Night,” which is more less repeated on “O Antropoceno” and “Hyperkinetic Mass Disorder,” gets a little tedious. These songs, which hold more in common with 1960’s psyche that borders heavily on post-rock (think Taj Mahal Travellers, Pärson Sound or Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd), somewhat overstay their welcome.
“Mega-ritual” is a cold beverage on a summer’s day or for some, a sore thumb on an already horrifically mangled and deformed hand. The IDM elements are continuously present without the ambient soundscaping on top of a furiously rapid grind-ish song. The vocals being drowned in a sea of D-beat blasts and shrieking guitar feedback is by no stretch a bad thing, being somehow a bastard child of Aphex Twin and Converge, fading into the previously discussed percussion interlude “Hyperkinteric Mass Disorder.”
The allusion of percussion and psychedelic rock is soon revitalized once more on the following track, “Free Speech for the Dumb,” with all of the elements referenced already, yet put into a far more concise, doom-sounding song with an actual chorus and verse! The repeating and delayed title track mantra is burrowed into one’s ears before and after being relieved, or perhaps punished by an expressive noise guitar solo. Being the longest track, “Free Speech for the Dumb” is truly the highlight track of the entire record, in addition to it being the most familiar to die-hard fans, as this song is closest in sound to the heavy jamming of their collaborative set at Roadburn. “Primeval II,” just like it’s second half, consists of Brazilian percussion, through what appears to be two bossa-nova jazz drum kits that sit on top of a disorienting vocal sample, closing out the entire album.
Much like their contemporaries, as well as their previous work, Petbrick and Deafkids have shown brightly the unraveling path of contemporary metal and noise and possibilities by pushing it to it’s absolute limit, and they kill it while doing so on Deafbrick.
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