“Batra” is an attractive domestic hardcore and “crust punk” (they themselves describe their style as “power-violence”) group, which mostly sticks in the mind with their stage performances and visual image, the central element of which is the vocalist who comes on stage in a sadomasochistic view – at least that’s how the reviewer saw him at a concert in the “Republika” club.
Currently, it looks like “Batra” will have taken a break for a while, because the concert taking place in “Depo” in the first half of September was announced with “it’s going to be a big party, which, unfortunately, will be our last, before the creative break and “biting”. However, before the “biting”, the band’s latest EP or mini-album was handed over “for the pleasure of injuring your ears”, which was “paid for by handing over the empty container” – that’s how “Batra” reported. Eight pieces in total, each about a minute long. It was all recorded and produced by the “underground” world recording god Đirts Laumanis or Lomiks in his “Hodila Records” studio.
In fact, this EP is not available on Spotify, but some of the other tracks are. For example, the mini-album “Progress” released in 2005 and its counterpart “Positive Aggression” launched last year, from which the song “Mahima” could be especially highlighted – both because it is the heaviest piece, and because it is the wittiest, and because that itself, the longest, because its duration is at least 1 min. and 15 seconds, the others don’t even have that much… By the way, the total duration of the six songs included in the mentioned EP is 6 min. and 2 seconds – probably a record…
But the oldest available recording of “Batra” is the song “Putin ubijca” by the Belarusian group “Contra la Contra” (it existed from 2000 to 2004 and stopped because it became unsafe in Belarus to express any kind of opinion that did not coincide with regime) cover version of the song and originally released in 2001, at the beginning of the war in Chechnya. As the war in Ukraine unfolded, “Batra” decided that there was no better time than now to revive a song whose lyrics are more relevant than ever, so at first “Putin ubijca” was released on the Internet as a single, but now it is also included in the EP “In Brief” .
We recommend listening to the songs “100 rolling heads” and/or “Ethanasia” from the new EP for testing, but you can also not listen to anything – you will not have lost anything, because there is no musical value here. If you take into account that you still need to learn, “Batra” is quite good for that – in their work you can get an insight into what extreme hardcore sounds like.
2023-09-28 17:58:26
#REVIEW #Batras #Nutshell
