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Wow, I didn't see this one coming at all. I liked Brimstone Howl's previous album, Guts of Steel, but I'm ready to declare my love for the band with We Came In Peace, the band's fourth in three years. The album succeeds by tapping directly into the original pulse of rebellious 1950's rock'n'roll and follows its growth through 1960's beat bands, Detroit proto-punk and the early stages of punk rock. Most of these 15 songs are drenched in the same pools of sweat that you can find on records by Johnny Burnette, The Cramps and Nuggets bands, but played at fast Ramones/Damned speeds, but don't mistake this Nebraska four piece for a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen incapable of doing anything besides thrashing out three chords. They can also concoct a dark VU/JAMC-styled feedback ballad like "Easy To Dream", kick up a wild voodoo-infused jungle-blues ruckus on "Obliterator" and dip into psychedelic space-rock like "Yr. Gonna Walk", where the band sports perhaps as much reverb as I've heard outside of perhaps Outrageous Cherry (another contemporary band that Brimstone Howl can claim sonic kinship with). What's most amazing is that no matter what the band are doing on a particular song on We Came In Peace, they are doing it in uniformly excellent fashion, with every instrument fully locked in tight and a typically excellent production from Jim Diamond. This is going to easily find it's way onto my Top Ten of 2008.
DAVID MANSDORF
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