Garry Brents: A Two-Course Meal

Deep in the labyrinthine abyss of Bandcamp, occupied by über-prolific artists like Colin Marston and Jared Moran, Garry Brents is a name that doesn’t come up as much as it should. Despite his relative anonymity, the Dallas sound engineer and multi-instrumentalist has been busy populating an entire desert island with his eclectic projects, standing as further proof that today’s black metal (BM) pioneers seem bound by a blood pact to release obscene amounts of music. Trhä, Asthâghul, and Déhà have all made recent and regular sacrifices at the altar once frequented by Venom. But like Jute Gyte, Brents already boasted a stacked catalog in the 2010s, thanks to his work in Cara Neir. That two-piece concocted a mix of BM and post-rock that was deliberately distinct from blackgaze, due to its synthetic textures and Bark Psychotic bass tone corroded in rusty raw-BM production. It was in 2021, however, that he surrendered to the call of Belial for good. Since then he’s been composing, recording, mixing and mastering albums in sessions that span only days and, sometimes, just a few hours. This rampage has borne fruit in a wide variety of projects, including his pixelated Bandcamp favorite, Gonemage; its gritty, dissonant, and recently decommissioned antithesis, Homeskin; and the new, no-frills savagery of Demon Sluice. We’re focusing on the latter outfits in this two-course meal, because we know our readers will want to know more about this talent than that he crushed the boss stages in WarioWare, Inc.

Homeskin - Life's Wishes to Tears (Self-released)

It’s been a hot minute since we’ve last treated ourselves to a good cup of blackened skramz. Homeskin never complied with Brents’ sentiments for 8-bit fantasy, its themes typically concerning rather emotional—and excruciatingly real—expressions of fear and helplessness. And yet, Life’s Wishes to Tears represents the project at its most stripped down. The release benefits curiously from not being rose-tinted by the artist’s unconcealable excitement for exploring different sounds. Brents parts ways with the Gonemage universe in substance as in stylistic presentation, when he slams the pedal to the black metal with blank, blunt snares and visceral leads that evoke a coiling hardcore pit. The voices on the recording sound less like studio-based performances and more like condemned souls screaming in agony under the beat of sanguinolent drumsticks. The cries quiver and resonate metallically, as if Brents had his vocal chords surgically removed and replaced with copper reeds. 

Similar to the progression of Cara Neir’s albums, the songs get longer, the effects more layered, and rhythmic patterns more complex as we march deeper in the tracklist’s maddening lairs. The breaking point arrives at the record’s proto-symphonic goth-punk bop, “Dripping Chalice.” The track isn’t just unique within the framework of Brents’s repertoire; its four minutes comprise an uncanny sequence of abstruse motifs. Set in a grinder of serrated synth leads and washes of reverb, the song careens onwards with jumpy rhythm sections, spiced up by fuzzy autotune vocals and crowned by the out-of-pocket, but nevertheless welcome appearance of a high-hat heavy hip-hop beat. “Missed Hours” performs a similar hat trick of slow-burning screamo gimmicks, with an even slower-burning doom metal underpinning driven by shoegazing pedal work. By contrast, “Feign” introduces an interplay between eerie lounge themes you might expect on a Mamaleek record and cheerful, almost childish melodies, rendered terrifying in the context. This duality also leaves its mark on the ominous title track, whose thoughtful procession indulges in cut-throat BM riffing so as to straddle hysterical desperation and the acceptance of fate. If that’s how bitter and perplexing you take your blackened skramz, Life’s Wishes to Tears is a must.

-Mutant Nayad

Demon Sluice - Demo MMXXIV (Self-released)

In a well-executed plucking of the public domain’s vast pastures, Brents bedecked his debut demo as Demon Sluice with an especially gory segment of Hendrick Goltzius’s Cadmus Slays the Dragon. It’s an apt choice, and not just because it’s much preferable to the slew of AI art currently populating the metalsphere. Brents’s extract from the oil painting makes the head-gnawing monstrosity the focus, rather than the smooth skin and contrapposto stance of Goltzius’s hero Cadmus. In other words, Brents foregrounds the raw and uncultivated vigor of aberrance before any cool, stylish pose. That’s precisely the way I like my metal, and in the music as well in the presentation, Demon Sluice makes a sharp left turn from the conceptual framing and mannerist ornamentation of Brents’s other solo projects. While it’s hard to contend with the originality and range encapsulated by the chiptune war metal of Master of Disgust… and nü-metal extravaganza of Spell Piercings, here he channels his talent toward metal’s most fundamental unit of expression: the riff. This back-to-basics mentality not only makes me feel less like I’ve been micro-targeted as a Nintendo child of the nineties, but also gets my saliva glands running just like the dragon’s. Opener “Circulating the Subnautical Hengiform” lays out a rip-roaring theme with just enough gnarled complexity to make you want to hear it again and again. And while the hellish barks evoke the early American BM bands that Brents cites as inspiration for Demon Sluice—particularly Profanatica—one can also hear the subliminal impact of death/thrash classics like Altars of Madness and even Close to a World Below in some of the heavy-hitting guitar cuts (compare, for example, “And All Felt the Ire of Charybdis” to “Suffocation” and “Sebaceous Heat Chasm” to “Put My Hand in The Fire”). When you realize that Brents is peering through these rearview mirrors, you can perceive a cleverness in the way his production squeezes tried-and-true riffage between pacy blast beats and goblin gutturals. Nothing screams novelty per se, but there’s a deft dimensionality in the layering and flattening of old styles that recalls an era when metal was more concerned with leaving a boot tread on listeners’ ears than identifying the imprint with a specific subgenre. Of course, this release is only the demo, so Brents doesn’t have to motivate (or sidle) himself with his clear love of narrative. Though it might be interesting to hear what stories this firebrand sound can tell, I actually hope that he learns from the Sluice how to fill space with sheer viscerality. After all, if Brents knew to leave Cadmus out of this release’s artwork, maybe he has come to understand that a nasty bite is sometimes all it takes to grab listeners’ attention.

-Mutant Geccho