Review Summary: If The Locust were any more insane, they'd be this guy.
There comes a point in time during every music listener’s progression where they begin to think they have heard it all. People begin to think they’ve heard music that is as heavy as it gets, or as brutal as it gets, or most relevantly, as insane as it gets. However, everyone can relate to getting those idealistic tendencies shattered by a band you’ve never heard before, or even a band you’ve heard countless times before. We get the notion that nothing could possibly surpass our set-in-stone expectations, and whenever such an incident occurs, we are dumbfounded. Time and time again this happens. It’s one of the best parts of being an avid music listener. With that, I present to you the one man monstrosity that is
Gigantic Brain, and the band’s debut album,
The Invasion Discography. At 63 songs and almost an hour in length, this is one of the largest amounts of grind you will ever hear condensed into one package.
Gigantic Brain is:
Every instrument (including what sounds like a woodblock!): John Brown
More a compilation of Brown’s work and less a cohesive album,
The Invasion Discography is completely insane all the way throughout. Within its hour-long time-span, the listener can expect to get a break from face-melting grind about 2 minutes out of the whole ordeal. What sets apart
The Invasion Discography from a painful experience is that Brown manages to be interesting all the way throughout. Splashed into his breakneck speed grind and million-mile-an-hour drum machine work are vaguely Nintendo-esque riffs, much like what you’d expect if Dragonforce didn’t suck. Keyboards play strange melodies, quirky notes, and leave a trail of ingenious ambiguity, much in the way that they are both necessary and unnecessary.
Unfortunately, Grind is not the easiest genre to endure for long durations of time. Twenty to thirty minutes is the average runtime of a grind release, with song-numbers often reaching ridiculous numbers. Add to this that grind often gets a lot of flak for their groan-inducing song-titles, and it can be a bit much to imagine an hour long concept grind compilation about the invasion of Earth and subsequent obliteration of the human race. Don’t be intimidated however. While ungainly upon first listen,
Gigantic Brain will quickly dominate you into submission. The key is giving it a chance.
It’s quite evident from the start that
Gigantic Brain is an album that feeds off of, (and relies upon) its own insanity to keep the listener interested enough to endure the whole thing. While most songs blaze by in just around a minute, each one has its own identity. Sometimes this identity is defined by a certain type of guitar playing; sometimes it is defined by a certain unorthodox instrument used. Whatever the case, after extended listening, the listener is able to pinpoint exactly which songs he likes best. This, perhaps, is
The Invasion Discography’s greatest strength, in that it is both an album and a collection of songs. For this matter, I would recommend listening to the whole thing twice; once to hear it, a second time to find your favorite songs.
This is an album where everyone will be able to find something they like, no matter how much of it they dislike. Give it a shot. It’s like getting hit by a train every minute for an hour.
