It's a frequent occurrence among the heavy rock realm for artists known for their heavier creative endeavors to try out more stripped down sounds, and enter the singer/songwriter field. It turns out that Brian Cook of Russian Circles, SUMAC, Botch, These Arms Are Snakes and more, is quite good doing that, as the first single of his solo project Torment & Glory is a delicate and poetic charmer.
Torment & Glory’s debut, We Left a Note with an Apology, will be out on August 27th, 2021 through Sargent House, a work which spans more than a decade of writing and conception, and has gone through a few obstacles until its final realization. With the project's inception sparked after a sincere listening session of Bruce Springsteen masterpiece, Nebraska, Cook seems to have created something very different, yet, correlated with his established musical sophistication.
Clearly, Brian is also a very expressive singer, although singing hasn't been exactly effortless since 2019 when he suddenly lost his voice. “It’s just one of those things,” the doctors said. “Maybe your voice will come back tomorrow. Maybe it’ll come back in a few months. But be prepared; it may not come back at all.” Eventually it returned after six months, not at its full extent. “My voice still cracks and warbles in certain note ranges,” Cook says. “It seemed like a good idea to try to rehabilitate my voice by singing, so I started adding vocals to the little fingerpicking melodies I’d developed over the years.”
First example off Torment & Glory’s debut is No Big Crime, coming alongside a music video directed by Bobby Markos / DocumaVision. We Left a Note with an Apology was fully performed by Cook, and mixed by his friend, Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe).
“All the songs are a reflection on youth and the reckless behavior that serves as a rite of passage,” Cooke comments. “It’s a way of atoning for some of the more aimless acts of rebellion I dabbled in during my young adult years.”
Photo by Reno Tripiano
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