Written by: Dave Cantrell

We’re grateful for a lot of things here around the SEM post-punk desk – the sustained explosion of energy from the crop of new immortals spread all across the globe, the willingness of those same young musicians to generously share their efforts with us, the way the embrace of the form’s classicism (in all its many iterations) is animated by a fresh fearlessness of purpose, the passion apparent in the bands’ live performances whenever we get the chance to see them. But the thing we’re possibly most happy about is the simple fact that the well from which they’re all drawing seems literally bottomless. Consider East Vancouver’s Brutes. Comprised of vocalist Lindsay Dakin, vintage synth and keyboard ace Christian Pelech and primary driver/synth programmer Jonathan Salvatore, the trio are another in the growing stable of artists that comprise Rain City’s coolest new label Pop Era Records (Girlfriends and Boyfriends, Mode Moderne) though Brutes veer a bit madly toward a whole different edge on upcoming single “Leathe” as Dakin’s lucent, urban siren vocal negotiates the damaged neon textures of her bandmates’ analog synths that float and pound around her suggesting both menace and allure, resulting overall in a driving hauntalogical club vibe that promises either ecstasy or an unnerving trepidation depending which way you turn. With strands drawn together from a dizzying assembly line of source codes – call it Neue Depeche Mode Deutsche Welle coldwave, if you like, but you’ll still be leaving out Aphex Twin and Giorgio Moroder and even a touch of Reichian minimalism – Brutes make us think we’re living in multiple cities simultaneously, even Vancouver BC. We can hardly wait to travel around an entire album with them.