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Brakes
The Beatific Visions
Rough Trade
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Article
written by Ged M
Nov 17, 2006.
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An older friend once advised me that the records you love the longest are the ones that take the longest to love. If they were too easy, you’d soon get bored. That guidance worked for some things (‘Trout Mask Replica’ for example) and was also responsible for me wasting far too much time on self-indulgent crap. Brakes’ second album ‘The Beatific Visions’ goes against all that advice; it has immediate appeal but I get the feeling, like their debut in 2005, that this is the beginning of a long term affair.
Like the first album, ‘Give Blood’, it’s less than 30 minutes long and not a second is wasted. It combines styles and moods from frantic punk-pop to thoughtful alt.country. It was recorded at the House of David on Nashville’s Music Row and that’s studio owner David Briggs – former sideman of Elvis Presley – laying down the tinkling piano on ‘If I Should Die Tonight’, the first time in three years that he was moved to appear on record. But the Southern location hasn’t skewed the balance: there are raw love songs like ‘Isabel’ and the jangly ‘Beatific Visions’ sat alongside more raucous tales like the angular, made-for-moshing ‘Porcupine or Pineapple?’ (“Spiky! Spiky!”) and the 60s R&B barnstormer meets insane indie blast of ‘Spring Chicken’.
When it’s not intensely personal, the album is furiously political, fuelled by a righteous anger at the state of the world. ‘Hold Me in the River’ is two minutes of punk-pop genius, like Pixies at their most combustible, blasting the ‘War on Terror’ with the lines “I woke up late and found my liberty lost/ it had been written down in law as a security cost”. You won’t hear a better wake up call – politically or literally - this year. ‘Porcupine or Pineapple?’ screams “who won the war/ was it worth fighting for?” while ‘Cease and Desist’ paints a vision of the world where God and Satan are playing cards for control of creation (God loses). The last song then takes Brakes in a fascinating new direction: ‘No Return’ is elegant and eerie glitch-pop with faintly buzzing keyboards and a sad, crepuscular feel: “the pain of being together is more than being apart”.
When ‘Give Blood’ was released, the members of Brakes were seen as a “supergroup”, moonlighting from their day jobs. Now that Brakes is their first priority, they’ve coalesced brilliantly as a band and sound fantastic, and they wear that “supergroup” tag more comfortably – this is one of the best, if not the best, albums you’ll hear all year.
Untitled Document
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