If there’s one thing you can’t fault it’s Barrabus for trying. These angry weirdos paint themselves as some sort of missing ingredient from alternative music and well, fair enough. Coming from the school of Uncyclopedic knowledge messed in with some Big Data analytics and holed up using the zeitgeist of the nineties ‘tude as a marketable rhetoric, which is prevalent in their press release, is quite funny in retrospect but to be fair the tunes match up.
The first eponymous album from Barrabus is a coherent tarring of all that is good and money. With extreme-lite riffs backed up with that ever endearing funk that seems to find its way into heavier metal the societal narrative that hides behind the circus metal soul isn’t a new kind of madness but it’s got some surprises in its hairy loins and it’s enjoyable, very much so, Barrabus has a level of sophistication to its off the wall socio-centric presentation and I’m game, but only because the songs are larger than life.
Barrabus are certainly filling a hole in the prospective music industry, sounding like a more extreme grunge, it’s perhaps good timing that these guys unleash their sonic creativity upon the world because as twee as their dismissives for the industry may be it’s grounded in things that matter and complimented in barbarous punk cum metal in grunge clothes. Yet for a better and less tangential description of this album let’s call it indie death metal. With independent routes being taken liberally but defaulting on the discordant infrastructure of death metal riffing. Good sounds.
7/10
