Brown Angel

***Over an improbable 20-year career, Pittsburgh noise-metal lifers Brown Angel have sought not to entertain, but to obliterate. Personal demons have always been the intended targets of Brown Angel’s excruciating dissonance, repetition, and weapon-grade volume. Audiences who beat a retreat rather than absorb the collateral damage can hardly be blamed—or even noticed by the trio, who often enough are left to close a set before an empty room, basking solipsistically in their own harshness. A plodding creative process (sum it up as “doing it the hard way”) likewise promotes neither sustainability nor commercial appeal. Yet somehow—despite three botched “breakup attempts” and a prolonged separation by half the world’s time zones—Brown Angel has managed to deliver their most personal and definitive work with new album Promisemaker.

Promisemaker is Brown Angel’s second full-length release for New York City's Sleeping Giant Glossolalia label. The band continues to work against a crude scaffold of post-punk, late ‘80s death metal, early industrial and no-wave at its most nihilistic. As exploratory deviations from form, “Proxy Anxiety” and “Guilt Tending” don’t so much detour as slouch into rock sensibility—albeit one informed by the shimmering chordal textures of the late Geordie Walker and set to a pulse that splits the difference between motorik and thrash metal. Confessional and cathartic, lead single and video “Who Wants a Dreamer?” posits generational shame handed down like an heirloom, discouragement offered as daily benediction. Guitarist/vocalist Adam MacGregor(ex-microwaves, ex-Creation is Crucifixion, ex-Conelrad, and ex-pat) bellows these grievances over gnarled, brittle-toned riffs that erupt into poisonous blooms of feedback. More doomsday device than rhythm section, drummer John Roman (microwaves, Rated Eye) and bassist Mike Rensland heave each beat against the next with juggernaut finesse and an abyss-dredging low end. The duo lead the charge on the bludgeoning “It Was Hard (Piteous Trench)”, as MacGregor roars counterpoint to the hell-exhaust vocals of Zao’s Dan Weyandt, who contributed new lyrics for the retooled track from Brown Angel’s 2010 debut LP. Promisemaker was recorded in a Pittsburgh church by Sid Riggs (Rob Halford, Tony Iommi, Alice Cooper) and in Arlington, VA by Don Zientara (Minor Threat, Void, Rites of Spring, Bad Brains) at the legendary Inner Ear Studio. Mastering by James Plotkin (Khanate, O.L.D.).