The flurried aesthetic of Brains & Balls resembles the type of possession you learned from television and Sunday School: speaking in tongues with foreign intonation, superhuman strength, individuals with hidden knowledge of the future and the "innermost thoughts of the people around them". (By the same token — or on the contrary, as it were — those who practice Santería use sacred batá drum rhythms as part of a ritual to contact Orisha spirits and deify Changó, a force synonymous with thunder and lightning.) But losing yourself to supernatural will only leads to trouble, right? Here, the only spontaneous maggots in the family chicken dinner might be the choice of titles ("How To Choose Plus Size Dresses That Flatter (In A Mushroom)", "He's Likable Guts"). Stay the exorcist.
Brains & Balls is an emotional, sonic purge via drummers Nicolas Field and Alexandre Babel and pianist Jacques Demierre. The trio's works are about tension and release, though these rarely mingle over the course of a single track: it's either flashy drum solo voyages where every rim, spring, membrane and stick placement is utilized, or bubbling dirges of ringing, rumbling tones (yes Demierre is on piano, but his "prepared" and extended ideas attack, and when he does play keys he prefers blazing, arpeggiated multi-octave clusters). On "Who's Arms on Ma'am", they create mounting drones and subtle howls with a tapestry of bounced and dragged ghost notes, furiously rubbed heads, stunted cymbal crashes and Demierre's constant single plunking piano note. The choices of "Vulcan Nerve Pinch gravitate to muted scrapes, as the group employs this technique to grind, fondle, squeak, summon (at one point, the near-snapping piano strings emulate the sound of a symphony warming up in a rehearsal space next door) and strum everything within reach for the majority of the seventeen-minute work.
The entire album is thoroughly astounding from a technical standpoint, and the two intervals ("Lettre Du Gouverneur" at 3:51, "The Croquet Consortium" at 4:35) are fantastic tests of speed, the trio serving microsecond splats and commas, stopping on a dime, then flailing themselves back with accurate, full kit runs almost too quick to process.
With "L'Empire Du Nez", they finally merge the extremes and unveil even more tricks: while Demierre works his soundboard to produce either a dull thud or a booming echo after each pounded key, the drummers rally in call and answer with myriad bells, smacks, low end vibrations...
You get it: it's all the colors that percussion can produce, realized with, duh, brains and balls. And a few demons, the ones who passed on parties to stay home and practice until their hands bled.
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