Bri-an - The Rat

Hear The Track Here

You may remember we have encountered Canadian musician Bri-an a time or two, once in collaboration with Dazed and once on his own. I have, of course, heard much, much more of his work than this, just reviewed the two though. Fact is, in all the radio sites I have been, Bri-an seems to have established himself as a playlist regular but there again he has been at this some while. Take, for example, The Rat. First released (I guess) in 2007 it obviously taken me long enough to catch up with this Bri-an classic, classic by common acclaim even so it shows how far behind the curve I am. As you may imagine, the Rat is question may not necessarily be of the whiskers, teeth and claws variety. We all know plenty of human rats.

Personally, I am saddened that it has taken me so, so long to catch up with this absolutely devastating track, well worthy of the radio accolades given to it since its release. It also helps to understand why Bri-an has so many comments on it, when most Mixposure artists struggle for the odd one or two. Over and above all, though is the fact that The Rat is ******* awesome in every single respect. Biggest shout out though is for the song as a whole; a complete experience where everything compliments everything else - a very rare trick.

The obviously lazy rat bastard way of describing it would be to say that it is highly reminiscent of Entwhistle's Boris The Spider, except with real vermin. That is such a cop out though because IMHO The Rat is in a totally different league. Sure the track has the dash and energy of The Who about it, but that's an incidental reference I think because the rock sound that is coming out is much more modern in sound. I wish, along with several million others, that I could have come up with the riff that powers this track because it is a pure classic, as is everything else about this track. Oh and drums as big as houses. Can't fault that either.

MUST HAVE modern classic.