BRAHMASHIRAS - Stew / Thrown Stone - Caligari Records

Hailing from Vladimir, Russia, Brahmashiras wield a sound as idiosyncratic as their moniker. Across its seven abstract-yet-refined songs, the trio’s 18-minute debut EP marries the heft and grit of death metal to a throbbing, swirling husk of hardcore punk - gloomy yet hammering, askew yet straightforward - all given full flight with old-grindcore energy and heavy metal bravado. Each of those minimalist bangers lodges immediately into the cranium with a simple-yet-devastating hook and then winds weirdly into double-time surges or even half-time stomps. With just a touch of goth-rooted chorus pedal, the delirium gets even wilder and more intense - and then it’s over, and Brahmashiras emerge a deceptively engaging oddity that will hopefully bear even-more-delirious fruit in the future. Rudimentary Peni meets Carnage? Delirious fruit indeed! Perhaps giving some cryptic insight into this unselfconscious oddness, the band explain that moniker: “Although our gang is called ’Brahmashiras’ and has ’vajra’ as its leitmotif, the lyrics and image of the team have nothing to do with Mahabharata and Buddhism. Brahmashiras (aka vajra/Raudra/Pashupati, etc.) is an uber-gun that releases ultimate energy and extinguishes the universe - this was the basis for writing this release. Destruction of the universe = chaos, chaos = birth of the universe.“ Out On Cassette, limited to 200 copies