Brutal Jr. is a Raleigh-based post-punk and doom band, who, true to their name, is both austere and savage in the kind of way that only young can be. The attitude adopted by the three men who make up the band’s seething cohort (Daniel Morales, John Meier, and Ryan Yancey) on their debut LP Party Garbage is that of a teenager coming into awareness of the world. The entire project hinges on that initial recoil and reaction to the painful realization of how cruel and incalculably stupid the place you’ve born into actually is. It’s a fitting starting point for a rock album that gratifies and reifies rebellious urges. Urges that most adults eventually manage to tame as they get older, even though they are never able to address, or even fully untangle, the catalyst for these urges in the first place.
The themes of the album are couched in a narrative about a clandestine cosmonaut named OC-666, who upon returning to his home planet after a mission, finds it choked by pollution, overrun by the logic of greed, and ruled by a despotic overclass of demonic blood-suckers. So Earth, basically.
Party Garbage gets its name from an in-universe substance, a highly addictive drug that is pushed on the populace by their demonic overlords in order to soothe the acute pain caused by living in a sadistic system, as well as to keep them too doped up to rebel. The parallels between this and the opioid crisis of the past decade as well as the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s are almost too clear and agonizing to witness let alone unpack. Again, this is our world the band is talking about, even if it’s presented as allegory.
What you’ll probably find yourself enjoying about Party Garbage is the fact that OC-666’s attack on the devil world he’s returned to sounds an awful lot like the Cure. Deep basslines combine with aching synths with a haunted ambiance of doom smothering the whole affair. One of the more unique aspects of Burtal Jr.’s sound are the vocals, which are fairly forward in the mix and sit somewhere between Al Jourgensen’s skin blistering shout and Robert Smith’s projected aura crying for salvation through a sewer pipe.
All these elements combine in delightfully twisted ways. The bass line on “Sin Trading” is particularly captivating in its cold-hearted certitude, and the sticky, swamp-rose throned riffs of “Zsa Zsa” will pull you in like a hungry pool of quicksand. Brutal Jr. has a true affinity for all things goth and their integration of industrial and hard techno beats and melodies gives these songs a delicious, dark licorice quality that is both sweet and palatable while acting as a smartly calibrated counterweight to the brash thrust of the group’s raw post-punk grooves. This dynamic plays out effectively throughout the album, but nowhere more so than on the cold gospel lurch of “Eyes Roll Back” and the sickeningly vicious, iron flavored, vampire mascarade of “Sticky.”
Embrace your inner malcontent by supporting Brutal Jr. when you buy or stream their album Party Garbage below via Bandcamp:
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