BREAKER MORANT • 1996-1999 • LP

Expert Work Records

The 1996-1999 Discography LP by Breaker Morant is an emo masterpiece. The band, hailing from Columbia, Missouri, featured talented musicians such as Ben Graham, Sam Dothage, Todd Ramsey, and Josh Browning. This incredible collective worked tirelessly during the nineties to create an album that showcases their skill, experience, and ideas. One of the most impressive aspects of this discography vinyl is the musicianship. Their skills shine bright from scratch to finish, and even when you think you heard everything, these guys find ways to impress you even more.
While listening to this album, one cannot help but be impressed with the experience these musicians bring to their craft. Members Ben Graham, Sam Dothage, and Todd Ramsey were previously core members of the band Prozac Memory and honed their skills while playing together. After Prozac Memory disbanded in 1995, Sam Dothage continued to play in a band called Product 19, while Graham and Ramsey briefly started a new band before recruiting Dothage to start Breaker Morant. Their musical experience is apparent in every track on the album, with each song meticulously crafted to perfection. In addition to unparalleled musicianship and experience, their ideas shine on this material. The band showcases the ability to thoughtfully explore themes like love, loss, and self-discovery, making the album emotionally resonant. The lyrics are poignant and poetic, complimented perfectly by the powerhouse instrumentals of the entire band.
Conversation Politics is unquestionably one of those standout tracks that showcases what you could expect from a band that perfectly controls melodies, harmonies, and other progressive orchestrations. This song perfectly demonstrates their ability to create mindblowing segments where every instrument emphasizes another. If you are looking for a track that defines Breaker Morant, then Conversation Politics is a perfect example. Another standout track is Menchu, which features the same intense instrumentations. Their experimentations with elements borrowed from music genres such as emo, post-hardcore, noise-rock, and punk rock are mostly hearable in this composition. The continuous manipulations with various time signatures, tempos, and complex guitar shreds will leave you speechless. Track like Cry, Cape Canaveral, Cry introduces more straightforward explorations into the nineties emo music, while songs like Addiction Soliloquy, Icosahedron, and Song Seven showcase more progressive combinations of emo, screamo, and post-hardcore sound. This discography release is a tour de force of the nineties emo music. Their unparalleled musicianship, experience, and ideas are on full display in every track, making this LP a must-listen for any emo fan. While their career was short-lived, their contribution to the emo scene cannot be forgotten.
Expert Work Records did a tremendous job with the packaging and the extras. They put so much effort into this release, and it could pair those deluxe records by much bigger names in the game. You can pick between white or black vinyl (both limited to 100 copies) housed in a screen-printed high-quality cardboard sleeve. It also includes a twenty-page booklet with the story behind Breaker Morant, posters, flyers, photos, and other cool stuff. Also, you will get an 11×17 family tree poster. As I said, this release carries a lot of extras that vividly explain the importance of this band in times when the emo movement/scene was on the rise.