{"id":266300,"date":"2025-07-16T09:58:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T09:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/266300\/"},"modified":"2025-07-16T09:58:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T09:58:10","slug":"brutus-viii-do-it-for-the-money-ep-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/266300\/","title":{"rendered":"Brutus VIII: Do It for the Money EP Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

No Wave was called \u201cNo Wave\u201d because it was philosophically anti-\u201cwave,\u201d united in opposition to press-ready categorizations. Unfortunately, a locus of like-minded musicians does, in fact, constitute a \u201cwave,\u201d which is funny considering No Wave\u2019s legacy. No Wave, circa 2025, is multiple things: genre, sound, aesthetic, buzzword for when a musician lives in New York and makes loud music. Among these musicians is Brutus VIII, an LA-bred button masher who sounds like John Maus<\/a> got really high and binge-listened to Alan Vega<\/a>. Brutus is Jackson Katz, an ex-indie rocker (Slow Hollows, Current Joys) who ditched drumsticks for drum machines. Since the early 2010s, when he started his solo project, he\u2019s hawked a hearty imitation of the old New York avant-garde, but an even better mockery of it. He sings in a brooding baritone, presents as ultra-masculine, and performs with an interpretive dancer. This is a caricature, and in many ways, so is the movement he\u2019s engaging with: an anti-scene scene.<\/p>\n

That the music doesn\u2019t feel overly parodic, or insincere, is impressive. By tinkering with No Wave, Brutus VIII also tinkers with its masculine mythos\u2014the brawn of early Swans<\/a>, the suits and ties of Television<\/a>, the dogmatic rule of Glenn Branca<\/a>. In his most wrenching songs, like \u201cAnger<\/a>\u201d and \u201cBurn<\/a>,\u201d he plays a fractured despot, less inflicting power than reckoning with what he\u2019s done. When I hear those tracks, I picture sweaty men alone in their living rooms, ties undone and shirts rumpled, weeping before their wives get home. It\u2019s uncomfortable, and not because it\u2019s oppressively loud, or dissonant, or arrhythmic\u2014it builds a character, breaks him down, then forces you to watch.<\/p>\n

His slight new EP, Do It for the Money, strives for a similar effect. But while it does evoke pain, the pain seldom becomes agony, because the music is too muscular, too well-studied, to make his anguish believable. Katz has perfected No Wave pastiche, which is impressive, but at times somewhat robotic: an echo here, a blown-out synth stab there, a layered scream every now and then. As a result, he winds up with a half-sincere tribute\u2014serenading the very movement he set out to subvert. Take thumping lead single \u201cMy Eating Disorder,\u201d an honest attempt to confront dietary issues, like food guilt and body dysmorphia, not often thought to be masculine. Lyrically, it\u2019s packed with gender-deviant dictums, like the rousing \u201cWhen I grow up I\u2019ll be a skinny girl,\u201d which he screeches in the chorus. At a rhetorical level, it sort of works. But then again, these things are harder to believe when there\u2019s an overblown MIDI and six distortion pedals in your ear telling you to man up.<\/p>\n

Early Brutus VIII was devastating because he so deftly scored the loneliness of desperation. When I hear the overdone chaos of Do It for the Money, I miss the resourcefulness of A Hackney Pursuit, a 2018 LP that sounded like a Little Tikes synthesizer possessed by a panic attack. You don\u2019t need a huge rig to make \u201cI Am in Control<\/a>,\u201d but if you want to remake the title track of this EP, you might want to start saving up. If there is any glimpse of vintage tearjerker Brutus on Do It for the Money, it\u2019s on \u201cFive Goodbyes,\u201d the instrumental closer whose lush textures would be devastating if he were saying something\u2014like the staunch counter-masculinity of \u201cMy Eating Disorder\u201d or the jaded cultural critique of \u201cEichmann on Trial Again.\u201d Disappointing, but fitting for a record that screams so loudly it forgets to speak: In the best possible place for lyrics, there are none.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No Wave was called \u201cNo Wave\u201d because it was philosophically anti-\u201cwave,\u201d united in opposition to press-ready categorizations. Unfortunately,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[31104,77,269,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-266300","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114862325944988317","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}