Review of BRAHMAN's fourth album.
The Middle Way is BRAHMAN’s fifth and newest album, released in September 2004. The cover art is done interestingly: whereas it seems like a normal picture at first, it actually consists of three layers on top of each other. The first transparent layer contains a landscape with several well known buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Sagrada Familia in Spain all meshed together as if it’s one big town. Then there’s a transparent layer with colors and finally a layer with the Brahman logo in the middle of it.
It seems the songs on the album can be divided into three categories: fast, loud rock songs, melodious rock songs and some softer songs with a dreamy atmosphere to them.
The album starts with one of those harder songs, The Void, and also ends with one: Show. Both songs are entirely in English and the booklet contains a Japanese translation of them. Fast guitars, pounding drums and Toshi-low screaming in an aggressive way are the main keywords for these songs. Double-blind documents is one of them too, just like Circle back, which doesn’t even last two minutes. Though they definitely do a great job at these kind of songs, it might not be your cup of tea and in that case, the melodious side of BRAHMAN might appeal to you more.
Gentle and upbeat guitar riffs are played in the intros of the songs A white deep morning and (a piece of) blue moon, giving them a gentle and tinkling sound. However, it doesn’t take long before Toshi-Low’s powerful vocals break through. Both songs have incredibly catchy choruses, and whereas the songs are quite gentle without any aggressiveness in it, the guitars are still extremely fast, playing very melodious riffs.
Far from... is a dreamy song, with lingering chords and soft vocals. But, like each time when Toshi-Low starts to sing, it’s powerful and emotional. After starting in a very mellow and slow way, the gentle sounds erupt into a harder part, building up more and more. In the end, the song is so heavy that it’s hard to tell it’s still the same song; the contrast is surprisingly big.
From my window is a pretty peaceful song as well and is actually a cover. The original song was done by a Irish composer and as it was used for an in-flight video for the Japanese airlines, BRAHMAN took an interest in it and recorded it in their own way. The result is a much rockier version. On the song, a female singer joins Toshi-low, their timbres working very well with each other. The song is followed by Placebo, a song set in a 6/8 time-signature which makes one want to sway along with the beat.
Trees lining a street has a bit of a Latin-feel to it and again shows the great skills of guitarist KOHKI. There are some bridges which are suddenly in a different key, creating a very nice uplifting effect.
In short: The Middle Way is a great release from the quartet, and somehow it seems a little strange that not this album, but their previous one has been released in the USA. The formula of the album seems to work excellent: even though they have a distinct own sound BRAHMAN’s compositions still show a lot of variety. At the same time, we also get a good view of the musician’s abilities and skills and of course Toshi-low’s impressive vocals.
