Brainbombs - 2013 - Disposal Of A Dead Body 2xLP

 

Skrammel Records – SKRAMMEL-016

Disposal of a Dead Body is Brainbombs at almost absurd scale: twenty-four songs, nearly two hours, and four sides of primitive riffs hammered until they become less like compositions than unpleasant conditions. The recordings were accumulated between 2009 and 2012, with each year roughly occupying its own side, so the album also functions as a four-year sediment core. There is little obvious development from beginning to end, but that resistance to development is the point. Brainbombs have spent decades reducing rock music to a few stubborn components: a riff, a stiff beat, badly behaved guitar noise, occasional trumpet and Peter Råberg’s drained voice describing humanity from its lowest imagined position.
The title feels strangely appropriate for a record assembled from several years of unreleased material. This is not a carefully polished double album announcing a grand new stage in the band’s career. It resembles a sealed container emptied all at once. Yet the quantity exposes small variations that might disappear on a shorter record. “The Savior” and “True Master” tighten the repetition until the band begins to sound nearly mechanical, while “Prepared” and “The Clown” use wah guitar without producing anything conventionally psychedelic. The pedal does not open a colorful portal. It makes the room feel dirtier and more confined.
Drajan Bryngelsson’s drumming is essential to that confinement. He rarely gives the riffs the dramatic lift that another rock drummer might supply. The beat plods, repeats and remains almost indifferent to whatever ugliness the vocal is describing. Guitar and bass operate with similar bluntness, often circling one figure long after the listener has understood it intellectually. That duration moves the music from recognition into physical experience. A riff stops being an idea and becomes pressure. Dan Råberg’s trumpet occasionally enters like an alarm played by somebody who has forgotten, or rejected, the correct notes.
There are disruptions inside the formula. “Agony” is instrumental and briefly reveals that the band’s basement-rock sound can be forceful without the vocal persona dominating it. “Jealous” and “Jealousy” present related material in two forms, one closer to damaged rockabilly and the other dragged through heavier sludge. Songs such as “Don’t Go Near the River” and “Nowhere” allow the instruments to fall away, exposing the voice without its protective wall of repetition. These moments do not humanize the narrator so much as reveal his weakness. Beneath the declarations of control is wounded pride, humiliation, resentment and a desperate need to make power sound convincing.
That distinction matters because Brainbombs’ lyrics are deliberately vile. They repeatedly adopt the first-person voices of killers, abusers and sexual predators, offering almost no visible signal that tells the listener how safely or ironically to interpret them. The words should not be mistaken for neutral atmosphere, but neither do they make the music powerful merely by being offensive. What gives the record its lasting unease is the collision between those fantasies of domination and a band that sounds shabby, repetitive and emotionally stunted. The supposed monster is not majestic. He is pathetic, trapped inside the same riff, repeating his authority because the music continually reveals that he possesses none.
“Woke Up This Morning” bends a familiar blues opening into another scene of contamination, while religious references recur through titles such as “Libera Me Domine,” “I.N.R.I.” and “The Savior.” Salvation is invoked only to be mocked, denied or dragged through the same dirt as everything else. Even “Picking Flowers” and “In My Garden” turn innocent language into suspicious scenery. Brainbombs repeatedly place ordinary phrases beside implied horror, making the everyday world feel capable of concealing something rotten without warning.
The great risk of a record this long and intentionally limited is exhaustion. Brainbombs answer by treating exhaustion as part of the form. Four years pass, twenty-four songs accumulate, and the same damaged machinery keeps restarting. Disposal of a Dead Body does not reward the listener with growth, redemption or a final explanation. Its achievement is more severe: it sustains one diseased atmosphere long enough for brutality to lose any glamorous surface it might have possessed. What remains is repetition, loneliness and a voice trying endlessly to turn its own emptiness into power.