Album Review: The Brothers Keg – Folklore, Myths And Legends Of The Brothers Keg

It’s an overused term, but The Brothers Keg have already achieved legendary status - whether you’ve heard of them or not. They’ve done so not by doing anything particularly legendary (yet), but by creating their own mythology, with themselves at the centre. The trio are presumably all reasonably normal blokes from London but, at one and the same time, they are mythic beings from a celestial realm beyond the ken of mere mortals.

It’s there in the title, not to mention that wonderfully garish cartoon artwork. Folklore, Myths And Legends Of The Brothers Keg is as epic, grandiose and ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek as you could wish. Think one of Mastodon’s mind-bending concept albums crossed with Heavy Metal (the addled 1980s animated film), with the occasional nod to H.P. Lovecraft and an extra portion of Ringwraith-style riders of doom.

They start as they mean to go on, prefacing opener Moorsmen with a howling wind and a narrated introduction set amongst sacred stones and castles of glacial ice. That leads into a nine-minute epic built around slow, sludgy riffs and harsh, barking vocals. They also deploy Hawkwind-style space rock guitars before finishing the track at a full-on metallic gallop.

They follow a similar pattern throughout, following narrative and cinematic segues into middleweight doom sluggers and passages of swirling psychedelia. Musically there’s nothing overly complex, but there’s a wonderfully atmospheric ebb and flow and 13-minute set-piece Brahman has a sense of scale that expands way beyond its running length.

Folklore… mixes raw if measured aggression with that epic grandeur and a convoluted sci-fi storyline. They're not quite the full, nine-volume epic just yet, but this is still a debut to take notice of.

Verdict: 3/5

For Fans Of: Mastodon, Green Lung, Om

Folklore, Myths And Legends Of The Brothers Keg is released on September 11 via APF

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