Originally written by Sasha Horn
Brain Drill is the pulled-pork sandwich of death metal.
So from the first bite of Quantum Catastrophe, until the last which I’ve thrown up in my mouth a little, every attempt to latch onto a good piece of meat resulted in it spilling out all over the fucking place. And the spill is more memorable than the drill this time around. 2008’s gorifying short-order, Apocalyptic Feasting, was a tidy joint that found a tech-death sweet spot between flair and focus. Now, they’re on a flair hellride with nary a meathook moment to be found, pretty much dead-set on flexing until their muscles fill the whole goddamn room and are pressed up against your neck.
That said, I get it. I do. Quantum is a game of Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better played with high-speed-chase precision, knowing full well that it’s battling a multitude of others that also play to win, and it’s acting like it. Hear something that you love feel threatened, get paranoid, and then lose its mind a little bit by reducing itself to incessant guitar noodling stretched out over the entire duration of an album’s playing time; imagine Korsakov’s “Flight Of The Bumblebee” sewn together with an endless blast-beat, for forty freaking minutes. And how genius if they meant for this album to act as eight variations on the frantic theme of that late nineteenth-century orchestral interlude. But c’mon… We’ll call this what it is: a physical feat, and no more. Their inability to carry a tune is why the sweaty fingertips of Brain Drill’s soldiers might as well be producing the sound of an air-conditioner. QC becomes white noise, and frankly, it’s a chore to distinguish between each individual track. Even with the two or three allowances for bleeding room. Simply not enough.
So for what it’s worth, when I think of an actual brain being actually drilled, I do think of Quantum Catastrophe; blood webs and loose-meat being flung out to god knows where. My only advice to you is to wear a big apron and a bigger pair of headphones, and try to make sense of this hot mess.
