Brown Angel

Brown Angel

Pure Brown Energy

Dark Entries

Brown Angel descends upon Dark Entries with Pure Brown Energy, an EP featuring 6 tracks of gloom-laced electro-funk and retro house. Pure Brown Energy was born when San Francisco-based producer and Hard French collective member Brown Angel was faced with a gift and a loss: an original Roland TR-808 was given to them around the same time that their father passed away. To process their grief, they set about making an album that showcased the many facets of their being, in their words: “my gay tío side, my Latin goth side, my cruising down the boulevard side, and most of all my soft vulnerable side.” From slamming vogue/ballroom house to cumbia-inflected freestyle, Pure Brown Energy channels club sounds both contemporary and timeless, while centering the most eternal electronic instrument of all: the TR-808. Opener “Miel” grooves with the effortlessness of peak-era Masters at Work or vintage Kevin Saunderson, while “Dame Más” dials up the energy even further. The influences of Miami bass and West Coast electro shine through on “Maya” and “Love Me Right,” which pair razor-sharp beats with a flurry of samples culled from Brown Angel’s record collection. “PBE” and “En Movimiento” take the Planet Rock vibes to another level, combining influences from contemporary cumbia and reggaeton sounds with Brown Angel’s Latin goth flair. Each copy comes in a sleeve designed by Ricardo Diseño featuring illustrations inspired by Teen Angels, a popular 1980’s Chicano magazine. Pure Brown Energy brings a sense of urgency to the dancefloor, unreluctantly examining the...

Brown Angel

Promisemaker

Sleeping Giant Glossolalia

***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...

Brown Angel

Shutout

Sleeping Giant Glossolalia

***Shutout is the new LP by BROWN ANGEL, a post-everything trio from Pittsburgh / Ecuador for fans of noise rock raga, teutonic industrial aesthetic, and Hellhammer-grade weaponized dub. Much has been said of the unique sense of dread and paranoia accompanying Brown Angel's recorded efforts and live show: "...Nothing can abate that iciness in my spine brought on by RENSLAND's ponderous bass foundations (as if his bass lines are crawling to their death), MACGREGOR's pestilence-conjuring riffs, ROMAN's refractive percussion--the guy practically does to heavy drumming what Escher did to perspective."—Decibel. They have been called "eminently bleak and seismically heavy" and "sexless, glacial metal punishment" (Doug Mosurock) while the atmosphere they conjure has been compared to that of an abandoned oil tanker. Shutout is the band's most realized album to date. Limited edition pressing on clear vinyl.