Beyond Underground (Review)

Brethren, a Christian hip-hop duo consisting of beats merchant and producer Wizdm and graffiti maestro Mystery (of the Bounty Hunters crew), are senior players on the Sydney hip-hop scene, having been around for some fifteen years, and featured prominently in Paul Fenech’s scene-defining 1997 documentary Basic Equipment. This is their long-awaited debut album release, and has the distinction of being the first ever Australian hip-hop concept album, pursuing a science fiction narrative in which our heroic duo, in the guise of agents 20118 and 973, set off on an underworld odyssesy in pursuit of the origins of strange underground shock waves and sonic booms, through a post-apocalyptic Terra Australia, where an insurrection has taken place at Pine Gap leading to the disintegration of federation, reducing he continent to ‘a fragmented labyrinth of makeshit colonies and rudimentary fortresses’. It follows on from the EPs Big Brother in 1996, which featured Wizdm’s Spanish lyrics on ‘Pasa La Cuchara’, an ode to immigration to Australia from Chile, summarised in the lines ‘Que passa Gough Whitlam, Ciao Pinochet’, and 1997’s Slingshot, the title track of which was something of an underground anthem of its time, as was their later track ‘Sydney Represent’, produced by Def Wish Cast’s Ser Reck, and celebrating the history of Sydney hip-hop from the perspective of ‘Brethren the veterans with relevance’.

Beyond Underground is accompanied by a limited-edition comic book, written and illustrated in black and white by Mistery, which recounts the ‘expanded story’ of the album. This is an impressive production, although it is badly in need of a spell check, and like the album, has a certain uniformity of style which limits its appeal. Strongly influenced by Mad Max, especially on the video release for the album’s single ‘Intercepta’, which features Mad Max replica cars, stunt men and Emil Minty, the ‘feral kid’ from Mad Max 2, the album also boasts influences from Journey to the Centre of the Earth, War of the Worlds, The Crow, Sleepy Hollow and The Matrix, as well as the film music of Henry Mancini, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and others. These are difficult to detect, given the rather regular beats and dual vocal delivery throughout, give or take a few orchestral flourishes. Mistery’s narration which links the 20 tracks is ponderously flat and featureless, and even Morganics’ news reader, who leads off the album with a report from Broken Hill on the post-apocalytic state of the nation, sounds unconvincing and underwehelming. It’s largely a problem of tone – there is a lack of humour and variety of moods and emotions here, with most tracks delivered with a relenlessly declamatory solemnity where touches of irony and levity would have been welcome. ‘Profit or Prophet’ takes a swipe at the Australian music industry and its relegation of hip-hop to an underground cottage industry, but without achieving much impact, and ‘Power of Words’ features a few lines in Spanish to little effect, while guests like Sleeping Monk, Mass MC, Ser Reck and DJs Nick Toth, Nino Brown and Flagrant don’t make much of a lasting impression on proceedings (and as with so much hip-hop, there is a dearth of female voices). One can’t help the impression that in their long absence from recording, Brethren have been overtaken by more recent developments in Australian hip-hop, with groups like Curse Ov Dialcet and TZU and artists like Maya Jupiter, Macromantics and Liones offering far more experimental, adventurous and variegated excursions into the genre. Brethren’s faintly ludicrous sci-fi gangsta pose in front of the Intercepta car on the back cover of the CD, in black replicant-like garb and dark glasses, weilding lethal looking artillery, seems only to confirm that this may be a key moment of local hip-hop history, but it is not a very enduring or exciting one.