Swiss trio Charlene Beretah will release their debut album, Ram — or, more properly, Charlene Beretah’s Ram — on Nov. 8 through Division Records. Aside from the 2016 two-songer EP Depraved/Very Long Week — granted, each song was 10 minutes long, but there were still just two of them — it’s also the only recorded output from the Neuchâtel outfit, whose style melds grim atmospheric doom with sludgy rawness, a punk undercurrent and a sense of onslaught that’s vital throughout the 40-minute run of five tracks. In terms of aesthetic, it’s more brutalist than brutal, if one thinks of “brutal” in terms of metallic extremity and brutalism as the architectural movement that showed authority could be communicated through harsh corners of institutional building walls, random seeming juts and unexpected line patterns that convey an unshakable sense of resolve. Prisons. Some libraries. Office buildings. They might occasionally be eyesores, and Charlene Beretah are nothing if they’re not caustic as well, but that only becomes part of the statement being made in both cases.

Ram begins peacefully enough, with a quiet line of keyboard/organ before a sample from Full Metal Jacket — “The dead have been covered with lime. The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive” — before the full breadth of the distortion arrives with the slowly unfolding riff. Bass leads the way through the harshly shouted verses, but that guitar remains a looming threat with background noise and telegraphed reentry while the drums move between midpaced groove and snare fills. Immediately the atmosphere is weighted. Immediately the affect is raw. And immediately the listener knows that this is what Charlene Beretah wanted the album to be. It’s not underproduced, but the material on Ram — which ends its opener in furious fashion and moves into the subsequent “My Dream” for an all-the-more-fucked feel — revels in its own nastiness in such a way that lets the audience join it in scaling these harsh corners and protruding walls. And as it moves into the repetitive chug and starts and stops of the first half of the 11-minute centerpiece “Hurt,” the authoritarian spirit is like having bricks piled on your chest one at a time until you can’t breathe anymore. “Hurt” shifts into a quieter YOBby midsection, and the screaming-mania payoff that follows might be the most satisfying on the record, though there’s plenty enough competition to go around.

Then comes “Amazing Disgrace.” Without listening to the full album — can’t help you there, but you can hear the premiere of “Amazing Disgrace” on the player below, and that’s not nothing — it’s hard to fully understand the role “Amazing Disgrace” plays as the penultimate inclusion. It’s two and a half minutes long, and it owes as much to crust-via-Napalm Death as it does to sludge or doom or any other kind of heavy noise, and while it might be sandwiched between the record’s two most extended tracks in “Hurt” and the 11:43 closer “Kurdes Game,” it’s furious enough to distinguish itself even in those chaotic-seeming surroundings. It’s more than just pure rush, but its thrust is where it most makes its presence felt, and it’s there and gone into the mid-paced start of “Kurdes Game” like a blinding flash of extremity. But both “Hurt” and “Kurdes Game” benefit immensely for its being where it is, since it allows each track to stand on its own while also being a standout itself. It ends up being the point on the album at which everything comes together. And then “Kurdes Game” smashes it all to bits again and that’s about as fitting an end for Charlene Beretah‘s debut as one would dare to imagine.

Vital, destructive, oppressive and cast out with enough force to be an expression in the physical as much as the aural, Charlene Beretah’s Ram is an offering that requires a specific kind of head to appreciate, but that segment of audience ready and willing to be so thoroughly steamrolled will find Charlene Beretah a bone-crunching delight.

Enjoy “Amazing Disgrace” below:

Born at the dawn of the year 2014 in Switzerland, CHARLENE BERETAH initially started out as a duo with Thierry on drums and Arnaud on guitar / vocals. Inspired by styles as sinister and diverse as sludge, blackened crust and doom, in 2016 they recorded their first EP and soon after, in order to increase the levels of heaviness and loudness, the band recruits Guillaume to play bass guitar.

The Helvetians then worked on new titles and tested them on various stages in Switzerland and France. They entered the studio in the summer of 2019 to record their first album in live conditions to maintain the band’s raw feeling and energy. CHARLENE BERETAH offers a heavy and aggressive music with a cocky, sticky and oppressive atmosphere.

On this first album, the trio distills their influences throughout five tracks clearly reeking of the world’s end. The atmospheres are varied, though always tempered by the heaviness and the gloominess inherent to the band’s dark obsessions. Depression, murders and possession (both demonic and chemical) are topics treated in an atmosphere of furious madness and palpable despair. The groove, undeniable, smashing, thunderous, is interspersed with crust-punk accelerations that also recall the great hours of the Scandinavian second wave of black metal. You’ve understood, this first album is not in made of fine lace, and that’s precisely what’s so good about it.

Charlene Beretah is:
Charlene Petit – Guitar/vocals
Thierry Beretah – Drums
Jean Goisse – Bass

Charlene Beretah on Thee Facebooks

Charlene Beretah on Bandcamp

Division Records website

Division Records on Thee Facebooks