The cover places the album title directly across a shaved human forehead as though genre has become a medical condition, prison tattoo, initiation mark, or warning written upon the body before it is released into public. The eyes below have been enlarged and whitened until attention itself looks painful. They do not gaze calmly toward the listener. They appear trapped at the instant of discovering too much. A thin red border contains the face without making it feel secure, turning the square into a specimen window through which something overexcited has noticed us first.
The lettering matters. TRVE BRUTAL BLACK JAZZ is not typeset in elegant jazz typography or rendered through an elaborate black-metal logo whose branches require botanical study before the words can be deciphered. It is written by hand, unevenly, like the conclusion reached during a sleepless night and immediately applied to skin. The phrase is simultaneously boast, joke, manifesto, and diagnosis.
“Trve” belongs to black metal’s old theater of authenticity. Replacing the U with V gives modern language a pseudo-ancient severity, as though the music has been carved into stone rather than advertised online. Within metal culture, the spelling can be used sincerely, defensively, or mockingly. It evokes arguments over purity, commercial compromise, correct production, acceptable influences, and who possesses the authority to determine whether another person’s darkness is genuine.
Jazz has its own authenticity tribunals. Musicians and listeners have argued over swing, bebop, free improvisation, fusion, electric instruments, funk, synthesizers, smoothness, composition, virtuosity, tradition, and who is or is not preserving the music’s true spirit. Miles Davis spent much of his career walking directly through those arguments while changing clothes. The word “trve” therefore does double work. It mocks black-metal gatekeeping while quietly reminding us that jazz listeners have also defended imaginary borders with remarkable ferocity.
Pelosoff does not resolve these disputes by choosing the correct side. He constructs music so flagrantly impure that purity becomes an unusable category. Blast beats coexist with horn arrangements. Distorted guitars make room for electric bass articulation. Extreme vocals are followed by clean singing and scat-like gestures. Jazz harmony is not placed politely over metal rhythm, nor does a saxophone merely arrive to certify adventurousness. Each language is made to perform tasks normally assigned to the other.
The title’s funniest word may be “jazz.” Black metal has accumulated an enormous visual vocabulary of forests, ruins, corpse paint, illegible logos, medieval weapons, snow, Satan, and deliberate deprivation. Jazz can still be lazily imagined through suits, clubs, cigarettes, polished instruments, intellectual concentration, and respectable cultural institutions. Trve Brutal Black Jazz forces the corpse-painted forest creature to attend rehearsal with the horn section and forces the conservatory player to continue soloing while the building catches fire.
Yet the fusion is not just a joke, because Pelosoff clearly loves the materials being disturbed. Humor creates the permission to begin, but musicianship keeps the premise alive after its initial surprise. A novelty mashup usually exhausts itself as soon as the listener recognizes both ingredients. Here recognition is only the entrance. The arrangements keep asking how groove, improvisation, modal space, dissonance, blast beats, funk articulation, and metal aggression can modify one another structurally.
“So What” is the perfect opening challenge. Miles Davis’s original is among the most recognizable statements in modal jazz, spacious enough to make restraint feel radical. Its famous bass figure establishes the piece without crowding it, while the harmonic movement leaves musicians room to shape long melodic thought. The title itself carries a shrug. So what? It dismisses the demand for explanation before the music has even begun.
Pelosoff turns that shrug toward genre authority. You are not supposed to combine this canonical piece with black metal? So what? The transformation does not simply place distortion over the original melody. It changes the emotional meaning of the composition’s space. In the Miles Davis recording, openness can feel cool, poised, exploratory, and conversational. Here open space becomes exposed ground across which something violent may charge without warning.
The bass remains crucial because it carries the piece’s identity through the mutation. Black metal frequently treats bass as a shadow beneath guitar, valuable for weight but difficult to distinguish as an independent voice. Pelosoff, being a bassist, refuses that hierarchy. The instrument does not merely reinforce the floor. It remembers where the composition came from and keeps that ancestry audible while guitars and drums attempt to burn the family documents.
The arrangement also reveals that coolness and aggression are not true opposites. Both can depend upon control. Miles Davis could create intensity by withholding sound until the exact moment it mattered. Black metal can create intensity through apparently continuous excess, but effective excess also requires placement, dynamic judgment, and collective discipline. Pelosoff translates one kind of controlled pressure into another.
“Tritone Labyrinth” follows by locating a shared piece of musical mythology. The tritone has long been surrounded by the story of the diabolus in musica, the devil in music, whether or not the simplified popular version of its historical prohibition is accurate. Metal inherited the interval as instant symbolic darkness. Jazz absorbed it as one among many available tensions, a sound capable of implying dominant harmony, instability, altered color, or a route toward unexpected resolution.
The title does not call it a tritone bridge, doorway, or weapon. It is a labyrinth. Once inside, the listener cannot move directly from jazz to metal or metal to jazz. Every turn reveals another passage, and the categories used to enter become unreliable guides. Swing may lead toward blasting percussion. A metal riff may expose an underlying jazz voicing. Saxophone can behave like a lead guitar, while guitar can become percussive interruption.
A labyrinth differs from a maze because it has often been associated with ritual movement rather than merely confusion. One enters, follows a winding route toward the center, and returns altered by the journey. “Tritone Labyrinth” treats dissonance this way. The unstable interval is not a problem awaiting correction. It is the architecture within which the musicians discover freedom.
Clean and extreme vocals further complicate the route. Metal often divides these techniques into moral or dramatic roles: the scream as monster, pain, aggression, or corruption; clean singing as humanity, beauty, memory, or release. Jazz uses the voice differently, allowing syllable, timbre, phrasing, and improvisation to detach from literal language. Pelosoff permits the voices to cross these functions. The scream can become rhythmic material. The clean voice can sound uncanny rather than reassuring.
“See-Line Satan” performs the record’s boldest act of linguistic mutation. Its foundation is “See-Line Woman,” the traditional song that Nina Simone transformed into a hypnotic portrait of a dangerous, desirable, economically powerful woman. Pelosoff converts the woman into Satan, replacing seduction with temptation, clothing with infernal costume, money with prayer, and romantic ruin with the sale of a soul.
The change is funny at first because “See-Line Satan” sounds like a pun discovered by someone who immediately reorganized an entire ensemble around it. But the substitution reveals an existing connection. The woman in the inherited lyric already possesses powers that respectable society historically coded as supernatural: sexual autonomy, mobility, economic exchange, the ability to attract a man and leave him damaged. Turning her into Satan does not introduce danger from nowhere. It makes the older song’s moral anxiety grotesquely explicit.
Something is lost in that transformation too. Simone’s performance grants the woman charisma, opacity, and control. She is not simply a demon inserted to teach men a lesson. She moves through colors, clothing, money, attraction, and disappearance with an authority that the listener cannot possess. Pelosoff’s Satan is more conventionally legible, equipped with blood, flesh, a crown, fire, prayer, and a contractual soul. The mysterious woman becomes the official administrator of evil.
The music partially resists that simplification. Its slow spiritual groove, horn colors, vocal interplay, and gathering pressure keep the character unstable. Satan is not confined to black-metal shrieking. The figure enters a musical language rooted in blues, work song, dance, repetition, and Black American performance history. European occult theater has wandered into a much older house and discovered that it does not control every room.
This makes the phrase “black jazz” unusually charged. In “black metal,” black ordinarily points toward darkness, evil, occultism, negation, and a specific genre history largely shaped in Europe. Jazz is a Black American art form whose history cannot be separated from race, migration, oppression, community, innovation, labor, and cultural theft. The same word enters the album title carrying radically unequal histories.
Pelosoff does not appear to be making a theoretical argument about that collision. His stated premise is personal and musical: Miles Davis meeting Mayhem, freedom in jazz meeting darkness in black metal. But the covers prevent the listener from treating jazz as neutral raw material. Miles Davis, Nina Simone, James Brown, and Marcus Miller are not interchangeable representatives of sophisticated harmony or funky rhythm. Each carries a particular history, authority, and cultural world.
The best moments on the EP occur when Pelosoff’s metal vocabulary does not merely conquer those sources but becomes less stable through contact with them. “Soul Power” is especially important because funk restores the body that certain forms of extreme metal attempt to transcend. Black metal may seek coldness, distance, inhumanity, atmosphere, and the sensation of leaving ordinary flesh behind. James Brown’s music insists upon hips, feet, sweat, breath, repetition, command, response, and the exact location of the beat inside a social body.
“Soul Power” therefore presents a more difficult fusion than simply adding a horn solo to blast beats. Funk depends upon musicians agreeing precisely about where not to play. The pocket is collective negative space, a disciplined arrangement of attacks and absences that makes the body anticipate recurrence. Extreme metal often creates momentum through saturation. Pelosoff must make density and pocket coexist without allowing either to become decorative.
The arrangement moves between vocal violence, churning guitar, horns, bass-driven funk, stereo percussion exchanges, blast beats, and renewed groove. Instead of smoothing these transitions, it enjoys the seams. The listener is allowed to feel one musical government being overthrown by another every few seconds. The instability becomes exhilarating because the musicians sound capable of surviving each transfer of power.
James Brown’s phrase “soul power” also changes meaning in this setting. In funk, soul power can name communal vitality, racial pride, bodily knowledge, performance authority, and the force generated when individual musicians become one rhythmic organism. In black metal, the soul is more likely to be damned, rejected, frozen, sacrificed, or handed to Satan. Pelosoff places “soul power” after “See-Line Satan,” making possession and empowerment collide. Satan wants the soul as property; James Brown wants the soul activated.
“Tutu” brings in another historical argument. Pelosoff does not choose an acoustic Miles Davis composition from the period most safely protected by jazz respectability. He chooses Marcus Miller’s title piece for the 1986 album Tutu, a record already shaped by synthesizers, sequencers, drum machines, funk, studio construction, and debates about whether Miles had moved too far from approved jazz practice.
That choice is central to the EP’s intelligence. Pelosoff is not violating a pure original. He is mutating music that was already hybrid, technological, controversial, and forward-looking. Marcus Miller supplied much of Tutu’s compositional and instrumental architecture, while Miles’s trumpet moved through a world of programmed rhythm and electronic surface. The piece had already asked how an iconic jazz voice might survive inside contemporary production.
Pelosoff answers by pushing it into another contested modernity. Blast beats and distorted guitars do not destroy the tune’s elegance. They reveal how durable its central contour is. The melody can pass through violence without losing identity, while the metal surrounding it begins acquiring the sleek nocturnal movement of Miller’s arrangement.
The bass becomes almost comically powerful here, but the comedy arises from delight rather than mockery. Black metal has entered the Marcus Miller zone, where low frequencies are allowed to articulate, snap, converse, and occupy erotic space rather than merely producing subterranean fog. One can hear why Pelosoff’s project had to be led by a bassist. The bass is the diplomatic channel through which the genres first recognize one another.
Samples or fragments of speech associated with Miles and Marcus further complicate authorship. The historical figures appear as voices inside their own transformation, not literally approving or rejecting it but haunting the experiment. The cover version becomes a conversation across time in which one party cannot respond directly. Pelosoff’s reverence is real, yet reverence here means altering the object rather than preserving it behind glass.
The title track finally attempts to make the invented genre exist without leaning upon a recognizable standard. “Trve Brutal Black Jazz” must prove that the phrase can name a living musical system rather than a collection of clever covers. It responds with the EP’s most concentrated collision: extreme vocals, blasting percussion, saxophone abrasion, choir-like voices, heavy guitar, jazz harmony, and shifting rhythmic authority.
The track initially seems to be announcing chaos, but repeated listening reveals arrangement beneath the apparent riot. Instruments are introduced and withdrawn so that the ear can register their functions before the next collision. The mix is dense without completely erasing individual players. That achievement matters because genre fusion often fails through politeness or mud. Polite fusion places each influence in a separate, clearly labeled section. Muddy fusion piles everything together until the concept is more audible than the music.
Pelosoff takes a third route. The elements interfere with one another while retaining enough shape to be recognized. Saxophone does not wait for the metal band to stop. Choir and growl coexist. Groove emerges inside violence rather than after it. The music becomes an argument in which everybody speaks simultaneously but has rehearsed the argument carefully.
The album’s home production reinforces its thesis. Pelosoff did not simply compose and play. He mixed and mastered the work, determining how much territory each incompatible element could occupy. Mixing becomes a political act at this level. Should the horns sit above the guitars or be buried inside them? Should the bass behave like metal support or funk leadership? Should the blast beat dominate the room or become one texture among many? Every fader decides which tradition must accommodate the other.
His solution is not always subtle, but subtlety would be a strange demand to impose upon something called Trve Brutal Black Jazz. The record’s exaggerated surface is part of its honesty. It does not pretend that genre boundaries evaporate naturally when talented people enter a studio. The boundaries crash, grind, interrupt, and occasionally produce sparks more memorable than a seamless blend could provide.
The humor protects this collision from becoming an academic exercise. “Who said you can’t headbang to jazz?” is an intentionally simple question, almost a slogan for a T-shirt or coffee mug. Yet the question contains a useful correction. Jazz was never disembodied music intended solely for seated analysis. Dance, rhythm, physical communication, sweat, nightlife, sexuality, and communal motion are fundamental to its history. Headbanging is not the first body movement brought into jazz. It is merely one more body movement translated into the room.
Likewise, black metal has never been purely primitive or anti-intellectual. Behind its cultivated rawness lie composition, harmonic decision, studio experimentation, mythology, visual design, and intense historical self-consciousness. Pelosoff does not force intelligence upon metal by adding jazz. He places two musics with different ways of hiding and displaying intelligence into direct contact.
The cover’s widened eyes now appear less possessed than overeducated. They have seen too many possible connections to return to genre innocence. The forehead has become a blackboard, but instead of equations it carries the conclusion: TRVE BRUTAL BLACK JAZZ. The hand lettering makes the discovery look urgent enough that typesetting would have wasted dangerous time.
Calling the music “trve” becomes the final joke because its truth comes from refusing orthodoxy. The record is most authentic when it behaves improperly. It honors Miles Davis by changing. It honors James Brown by demanding bodily participation. It honors Nina Simone by recognizing the dangerous force inside repetition, even while transforming her character into something more theatrically infernal. It honors Marcus Miller by allowing the bass to govern. It honors black metal by taking its darkness seriously enough to let darkness encounter other colors.
The EP was released on Halloween, the annual moment when ordinary people publicly wear false identities in order to reveal real appetites. Costumes are fake, but the pleasure of transformation is genuine. Trve Brutal Black Jazz operates through the same paradox. Its exaggerated Satanism, whitened eyes, “trve” spelling, and impossible genre label are costumes. Inside them, Pelosoff finds an earnest musical freedom.
A lesser joke record would ask us to laugh because jazz and black metal supposedly do not belong together. This record gradually makes the opposite idea funny. After half an hour, the old separation begins looking arbitrary. Blast beats and swing are both organized motion. A saxophone squeal and a distorted guitar harmonic can occupy neighboring emotional territory. Funk bass and metal riffing can negotiate shared weight. Improvisation and extremity can both seek the point where control becomes revelation.
The most brutal act here is not sonic aggression. It is the destruction of the little border office inside the listener that keeps asking each sound to show its passport.
The eyes remain wide because the customs agents have fled.
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