Knife Wounds
(Nine Mile)
Brothers Born is the new, Easthampton-based project of Joel Stroetzel of Killswitch Engage and Michael Wyzik, who’s been part of Red Door Exchange and Storm The Ohio. It’s worth noting up front that Brothers Born sounds pretty much nothing like any of those bands.
That said, there are two main directions in evidence here, and the tension between them provides the album’s energy. There are some big rock sounds — the guitars are overdriven and grandiose — but there’s also banjo. An anthemic song might rub elbows with something more nearly homespun in its proclivities.
The album begins with a calm acoustic rollick over which high-pitched, slow vocals unspool. Track two slips from a similarly acoustic feel to a slab of electric guitar chords. There are some constants that unite the band’s disparate feels. Chief among them is a vocal style that often employs long-held notes moving at a leisurely pace atop quicker-moving instrumental textures. At its best, that style lends tracks a confident sense of drama, as on the title track, one of the album’s two main standouts — it’s one of the handful of songs with a melody that you might find knocking around your cranium after some time has passed. The lack of such hooks is certainly no crime, but there are moments here in which the drama never arrives, despite an exceptionally grand instrumental stage-setting. In those moments, the slowly unwinding melodies sag into sequences of notes held so long the overall phrase never seems to find peak or resolution.
More often, though, the effect is one of ease, even relaxation, and the tunes drift from contemplative to full-on, stadium-ready rock. The latter is probably best realized in the hard-hitting pop of “Lonely Highway.” It may be an unexpected set of sounds given the musical pedigrees of Stroetzel and Wyzik, but Knife Wounds is a rewarding listen that reaches for, and sometimes achieves, that distilled brand of rock that can only be contained by really big venues. Brothers Born is joined by former Valley resident Matt Hebert’s Haunt project for a CD release at the Iron Horse Feb. 27.•
