From the wild, wacky world of Italian promos that we receive (and we receive a lot of music from Italy) comes Brothers In Law, an Italian duo apparently so enamored of Psychocandy-era Jesus and Mary Chain that they have release an EP that almost seems like a follow up to that record. Now, The Raveonettes have a made a career out of emulating that record, and of course A Place To Bury Strangers would not be anything without the Psychocandy fetish they layer on top of their My Bloody Valentine fetish. I mention this because i find it very odd. Darklands is the Jesus and Mary Chain album i go back to, not Psychocandy. But apparently that record rocked a lot of worlds... I guess i need to go back and listen to it again.
At any rate, Brothers In Law is a duo consisting of Giacomo on voice and guitar and Nicola on just guitar. No last names are given. Now, there are also some simplistic drum bits behind the layers of heavily effected guitar, and it is unclear who is responsible for that. It is not even clear if Giacomo is, in fact, related to Nicola by marriage. Whatever.
There are five songs here. The first one is Crystal Birds, a mess of squealing guitar and sparse drum hits. It sets the mood for the record.
The second track, Butter Bricks starts with a nice thudding bass riff and hi-hat, before guitars squeal by, accompanied by voice. The voice here is nicely deep and heavily echoed, and the guitars are so loud that they almost overwhelm it as they saw by. It moves at a pretty slow pace, but is a nice loud tune. Like A Good Dream is a very similar song, but sparser. This is the format stripped down to barely any drumming and just layers of guitar. This is more A Place to Bury Strangers that the previous tracks.
Brothers In Law pick the pace back up for Cycle. Giacomo's voice is very deep and growling here, buried under the guitars, which really soar. The band works well in this faster format. I think this is my favorite of the tracks here.
Finally, things wrap up with T.T.T., in which the band slow down to a crawl. At this very slow pace, the distorted guitars come across as eerie, making this a creepy tune.
I have to admit that what Brothers In Law are doing is not the most original thing, but they do it well at least. This is a nice, noisy EP, and fans of this style will find much to enjoy here.
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