Skip to any random part of the album and, chances are, you’ll be hit with what sounds like the final chorus of the final song, on the last night of the tour.
Since 2014, the Belgian trio have built a steady and dedicated following with their ferocious brand of post-everything heavy music but Unison Life cranks up the intensity further than ever, barely coming up for air across its run time. It’s electrifying and exhausting in equal measure. While it’s possible to parse influences ranging from basement bar hardcore, to austere post-metal, to skate-rat punk, Brutus never linger on one style long enough to be defined by it. Instead, they appear to channel the essence of those influences, mining them for the potent energy that propels them.
The fact that Unison Life plays out as cohesively
as it does is testament to the band’s sense of quality control, but it’s
also in large parts thanks to the unifying effect of drummer Stefanie
Mannaert’s vocals, which command an extraordinary amount of power in the
context of Brutus’ sound. Mannaerts’ vocals are mostly sung, with
lashings of raw heat that never fully break into full-throated screams,
but they’re no less visceral for it.
While her lyrics have a tendency towards the vague and
angsty, her performance does most of the heavy lifting in the tone it
conveys. Mannaerts’ voice sounds like it’s constantly at the edge of its
limits, and depending on the context of the song it communicates
overlapping shades of desperation, hopefulness, and rage. An interesting
lyrical pattern emerges over the course of the record as the words
“never change” and “stay the same” appear as a refrain across multiple
songs. Mannaerts is preoccupied with the concept of change, but we find
her variously resisting it, accepting it, or willing it into being. Each
of these states feel simultaneously similar and wildly conflicting as
her fiery delivery subtly shifts in its emphasis. On “Victoria,” she
clings onto the idea that “some things never change” with hope and
gratefulness, charting the friendships and family connections that have
remained constant while everything else changes around her. By contrast,
on the unrelenting “Dust,” Mannaerts’ “I’ll never change” is a defiant
cry of resistance against the overbearing expectations of the people
around her.
Mannaerts’ impassioned vocals feed into the relentlessness of Unison Life
just as much as the frenetic musical arrangements. And yet, Brutus’
greatest strength is also a weakness: with their pedal firmly to the
floor, they leave themselves with nowhere higher to go. It’s not a
complete absence of dynamic range – in fact, they repeatedly find
genuine beauty in the record’s quieter moments (e.g. the opening passage
of album closer “Desert Rain” offers a soft glimmer of hope in an album
that’s otherwise short of it) – but more often than not these are
fleeting, lasting only a few bars before the band ratchets back up to
full intensity, denying us the time to reset and come back down to
earth.
Brutus have said that for Unison Life,
they “wanted every song to feel like the last song we’ll ever write.”
If that was the ambition, they’ve surely succeeded; and for fans and new
listeners alike, let’s hope these aren’t the last songs – that this
isn’t really the end.
