Album review: Carpenter Brut – Leather Terror

The story so far: young science boffin Bret Halford is unlucky in love. The woman of his dreams, a cheerleader at his school in Midwich, is already dating one of his bullies. Taking on a rock star persona to woo her, Leather Teeth, he is involved in a serious accident which leaves him burnt. At the same time, a mysterious killer, The Midwich Boogeyman, stalks the streets. There is murder, cannibalism and violence afoot.

That was 2018's Leather Terror, the first act in French synthwave genius Carpenter Brut's intended soundtracks to an unmade slasher trilogy. It saw the band's singular brain Franck Hueso augmenting the perfectly-studied electronic scores from Terminator, A Nightmare On Elm Street and The Running Man with flamboyant hair-metal, disco nods and a leathered-up metal sheen, despite having almost no guitar, and vocals only on a few tracks.

Leather Terror, as the middle-third of the tale, is a much darker affair. The main character is now looking for revenge, and things have taken an even darker tone: more knives, more blood, more leather, more guest spots.

Even the overture, Opening Title, comes on strong, dramatically setting the scene a la James Cameron, before Straight Outta Hell unleashes fury from a bank of weaponised electronics. That it so often sounds like overly-mangled guitars coming from his keyboards is just one of the ways metal and synthwave gloriously clash throughout, and it's brilliant.

The guests add their own element to the terror, each writing their own parts and being given total creative freedom to hack away at their track as they see fit. Gunship's work on The Widow Maker is shadowy ’80s pop with a shiv in its back pocket, while Black Queen / ex-Dillinger Escape Plan singer Greg Puciato's vocals on the stomping Imaginary Fire give it a widescreen, athemic quality. <<…Good Night, Goodbye>> meanwhile sees Ulver mainman Kristoffer Rigg return to deliver a streetlamp-lit moment of reflection.

In between all this, the full-on blare of Day Stalker and Night Prowler, Colour Me Blood's stressful escape music, and the massive Paradisi Gloria all throw up pictures in the mind of what's going on in the story. Without a theme running through, Carpenter Brut is an already amazing proposition; marshalled together, however loosely, by a bigger idea running through it, it ties everything up into a deadly whole.

It ends with a classic cinematic 'to be continued…' As the title-track reaches fever pitch, Tribulation's Johannes Andersson, having added a genuinely sinister black metal edge, delivers a villain's monologue, in which he asks if his terrible appetite is, 'A curse or vocation?' before declaring, 'Blessed be the ones that don't get away from me and die.'

Leather Terror is an album of pure, devilish joy from an artist who completely understands what they're doing. It's not metal, but it is. And unlike so many trilogies, it's hard to imagine the concluding chapter here being a turkey. Not with this amount of bloodlust.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Perturbator, The Black Queen, The Prodigy

Leather Terror is out now via No Quarter

Read this: Terror zone: Inside the dark new chapter of Carpenter Brut’s album trilogy