Brute Spring’s music is born out of the feedback-filled mind of John Toohill who came to my attention on his Science Man album NINES MECCA, an epic 10-tracks of hardcore punk that could barely be contained by the studio that recorded it. Whereas Science Man’s output wants to test whether time and space can be warped by distortion Brute Spring’s album Turquoise Window focuses everything through a motorik lens. Toohill call this his “acidic, dystopian synth-punk project”.
To listen to Turquoise Window is to be taken to an abandoned industrial area where someone has set up a nightclub populated by techno-Goths which features a sound system so loud it could double as a fracking tool, and so much neon it would make Blade Runner look like a Christmas tree decoration. Keyboards are routed through distortion, dirty arpeggios compete in their own Fight Club against ice-shattering keyboard lines, bass notes thrum and scratch around on the concrete dance floor, guitars arc lightning and vocals are misshapen by FX into gravel and primal screams.
The opening salvos of ‘Blood on Sand’ and ‘Through The Window’ reminded me of the raw, early-days of Cabaret Voltaire and Simple Minds on tracks like ‘I Travel’) but much heavier. There is a relentless and menacingly joyous feel to the album’s journey, the pell-mell chaos of ‘A Vision of War’, the claustrophobic walls closing in on ‘Living Unseen’, the darkly ethereal ‘High Above’, ‘Engines of Hate’ with its feeling of a pep-rally-in-Hell, and the final crackling electronic flames of ‘The Crash’ where a rebar statue of Toohill is built in the centre of the industrial nightclub, doused in gasoline and set on fire.
If you’re going to have a side hustle then why not make it as epic in sound and design as Turquoise Window, and it may be a finer grain of sandpaper from Toohill’s Science Man output, it is still sandpaper. I am always drawn to the murkier side of the dance floor where the music has taken the dark alley not the brightly lit street, and this is a night club where William Burroughs and David Cronenberg are DJ’ing and Brute Spring headline every night.
Brute Spring socials: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Review by Paul F Cook
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