Brain Banger – Munsoned

Brain Banger’s fourteen minute EP, Munsoned, is a barrage of early nineties grunge rock. It’s raw, it’s blurry, it’s low-fi and it’s full sounding – like with Phil Spector’s famed “Wall of Sound” vision but this time they’re using heavily muted instruments.

The EP is chaotic and extremely heavy on distortion. They use feedback as an instrument and merge tight drum/bass combo with an ambient and guitar riff that is low-end heavy. The vocals are peppered softly on top, but they’re not weak and soothing. They’re raw and angry, a fiery force with a slight Tim McIlrath resonation to them but are flattened in the mix, falling below the guitar and fighting to be heard over all the fuzzed up instrumentation.

This is a grunge, shoe-gazing band with some 70’s punk nostalgia thrown in and really, it’s not my cup of tea. At less than fifteen minutes, I’ve listened to it countless times but it never changes my mind or grows on me but rather fills me with a headache due to the low-quality recording sound. It’s muffled, distorted and compacted – with each instrument fighting to be heard.

I know this is the perfect sound for some people but it’s just not for me. There’s some Nirvana qualities in there, but very few; a splash of Pearl Jam maybe and a few other of those early nineties alternative mainstays. Precision – the highlight of the album because the vocals actually stand out and they tone down the bass distortion a bit – sounds like a low-quality Foo Fighters recording; but as a whole, it’s just too muffled.

Some people may like this, but it just gives me a headache.