Brutal! consists of a group of jazz musicians who chose a jazz sound based on power and danceability. Soul jazz, hard bop and rhythm & blues sound through, but above all the jazzy and suspense-full soundtrack music that accompanied gangster films from the sixties and seventies, with screeching and growling Hammond organ and gurgling tenor saxophone. Brutal! emphasizes this once again by dressing
… up as the gangsters of the Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs and giving each piece on their third CD Mad Pack the name of a (fictional) character from a gangster film. Brutal! actually tries the same thing that Tarantino does with cinema, they arrange clichés and try to bend them to their will and give them a new youth. They do this with verve, but at the same time their sound still lacks the analogue fatness and rawness of the originals. In the long run, this will make the music and the entire decoration seem somewhat thoughtful. (MR)more