Joseon and High Brian Reviewed

Joseon – Burning

Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock

Many of us are forced to spend years confined in an edutation system that’s desperate to fill up our minds with details. Most of us, next, spend the rest of our lives trying to empty our minds of all those useful details. The best of us, the artists, are the ones that need this most. It’s when they actively stop pursuing a solution that they find one. 

This is what sounds like has happened to Joseon, a band that let itself naturally be guided toward a revealing, powerful sound. This is, after all, nothing new. Read interviews with many of your favorite songwriters, and you’ll discover people who will rarely be able to answer how they came up with their greatest works. They always seemed to be there. It was just up to someone to dig them up. 

Joseon’ “Burning” sounds like an exercise in rock n’ roll archelogy. There’s a song in there and this brand new rock group has just needed to let the song show itself. Musically, “Burning” spends its time utilizing grunge-rock dynamics and introducing mysterious, psychedelic elements. It’s a good start and a mighty effective strategy that the band is using here. 

High Brian – Oil Into The Fire

Our brains are naturally designed to fight off progressive rock music like a virus. But that only makes sense! It’s not an insult toward all of the work put in by the musicians or their undeniable ability. It’s simply  a matter of the fact that, typically, the idea of long-running, complex musical compositions seems to be the antithesis of what rock music is supposed to be. 

However, there are some musicians clever enough to dance around these standards. They understand that audiences, for the most part, just want to be thrilled. With the right kind of pressure applied in just the right kind of areas, technical prog music can be made to go out like a volcano spewing lava. And, hey, you don’t even need to call it “prog” when each generation invents its own versions for it. 

High Brain’s “Oil into the Fire” takes on the inventive, slightly cartoonish sounds of likes of King Gizzard, and creates a complex, ever-changing, sludgy prog-rock concoction. This is the kind of music designed to soundtrack a natural disaster and a piece that cleverly disguises the band’s considerable, undeniable musical ability. These Austrians have the finesse and terror-inducing tactics to make this kind of music work.