Brick Mistress - Anthology

Share this on Facebook | Share this on Twitter

BRICK MISTRESS is a completely new band for me. Apparently, they come from Central West Virginia and they were formed in the eighties. They were quite successful during their existence, until they received an actual record contract negotiation with a very reputable European Record Company. Somehow, they couldn’t agree, so everything just stopped. This was somewhere around 1993.

Everything BRICK MISTRESS ever has recorded is on this album. The first five songs on the first CD are from the “Rise and Fall” EP that was released in 1990. “Fight The System” was recorded in 2018 by Dave Green, Steve Moore and Jim Dofka, and is the one that easily has the best sound of them all. New techniques allow that, don’t they. The last four songs on CD1 are from demo tapes were recorded and released in 1989. As for the second disc: the first nine songs were recorded in 1993 and have never seen the light of day before this “Anthology” record. “Fight To Be Free” was recorded in 1988 and was used by the band as a demo to try and book shows this was before they hired an actual manager, which happened in 1989.

Musically you are looking at a band that was very much a fan of the Bay Area sound, but instead of taking that into the Thrash Metal way, as a lot of others did, they combined it with traditional Speed and Heavy Metal. This is why you’ll hear influences by bands like METALLICA pass by. Just to show how much these peers meant, “Art Of Psychiatry” could be named “Blackened Part Two”, while “P.O.W.” does sound quite like the SACRED REICH song “The American Way”. The riffs are quite similar and on both these songs Dave Green could pass for Phil Rind without a hitch. The big difference in the latter is that the backing vocals of BRICK MISTRESS  are a lot more melodic.

The quality of the songs is another question all together. There are no duds here, but except for “Nine Lives”, “Art Of Psychiatry”, “P.O.W.” and “Fight The System” there are also no tracks that really stand out. It makes this a very evenly balanced album, even with the differences in sound quality between the different sets of recordings. And as we are talking about 20 songs, it will take you some time to start to appreciate that BRICK MISTRESS was a rather adequate band that easily could have made it bigger with the right support. But as I mentioned before, when push came to shove, they couldn’t agree on whether to go ahead or not. Such a pity.

Songwriting: 7
Musicianship: 7
Memorability: 7
Production: 7