Album Review: Brat - Social Grace
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
BRAT have been active since 2021 and Social Grace is the debut album from this NOLA death-grind outfit. Already with a couple of EPs under their belt, and having share stages with Eyehategod, ACxDC, No/Mas and the legendary Cro-Mags, BRAT have made the most of their limited time together.
From the get-go, the four-piece grab the grind bull by the horns and gives us introductory feedback before rampaging into Ego Death, with its fuzzed-up guitars, bile-infused vocals and loose-stringed bass work. Hesitation Wound introduces a bit of groove among the deathly grinds, as well as some heavy hardcore and a sludgy outro.
I suppose it’s difficult for any creator not to be influenced by their surroundings, and BRAT’s origin of the Louisiana bayou must mean they’ve picked up something of the filthy, fuzzy riff and slow Sabbath worship. Slow Heat underscores that proposition with a merging of Birmingham’s finest: dark and doomy through its first half, turning into a Napalm-style frenzy to end.
Despite its short, less than twenty-one-minute running time, Social Grace packs plenty into its ten songs: from the raging grind of Truncheon to the classic Death Metal of Snifter and Sugar Bastard; and the oddities of the edgy grooves of early-nineties Sepultura on Human Offense, to the Slave to the Grind-flavoured Rope Drag.
Guitarist Brenner Moate conjures some wicked breakdowns throughout as Dustin Eagan and Ian Hennessey’s rhythm work is as bluntly sharp as the compositions demand. Liz Selfish’s vocals are twisted and demonic and are pitched perfectly for the album.
Closing tune, the title track of the record, is the longest and most complex piece, mixing something of all that has gone before into a three-minute symphony of the slow and doomy meets the grind-adjacent as a punishing beatdown leads us to a dissonant finale.
The subject matter at play here is the time-honoured preoccupation of the genre with the inevitable fall of societies ruling structures, mixed with a few horror movie references. This is a debut showing a band ready to push and stretch the boundaries of an otherwise quite narrow genre.
An encouraging and compelling beginning.
