| Bricks Are Heavy | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | L7 |
| Cover: | L7 bricks are heavy.jpg |
| Recorded: | November 1991[1] |
| Label: | Slash |
| Prev Title: | Smell the Magic |
| Prev Year: | 1990 |
| Next Title: | Hungry for Stink |
| Next Year: | 1994 |
Bricks Are Heavy is the third studio album by American rock band L7, released on April 14, 1992, by Slash Records. The album peaked at number 160 on the US Billboard 200 and number one on the Heatseekers Albums chart. As of June 2000, Bricks Are Heavy has sold 327,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen Soundscan.[2]
Produced by the band and Butch Vig, musically the album is heavier and dirtier than the band's previous recordings and described as "catchy tunes and mean vocals on top of ugly guitars and a quick-but-thick bottom of cast-iron grunge" by Entertainment Weeklys Gina Arnold.
In a contemporary review for Playboy, Robert Christgau regarded Bricks Are Heavy as an "object lesson in how to advance your music by meeting the marketplace halfway", although he believed it would not sell as much as it deserved. He said Vig helped L7 produce grunge-metal featuring "intense admixtures of ditty and power chord" that "never quite gathers Nirvana's momentum, but it's just as catchy and a touch nastier."[3] NME critic Angela Lewis called Bricks Are Heavy a "polished, virile white heat rock" record that "verifies their hard rock credentials completely" and demonstrates that L7 ought not to be pigeonholed as a grunge act in the vein of "Hole–Babes–Jane". Kerrang!s Steffan Chirazi was most impressed by the album's "relentlessness" in "driving the frustrations of everyday life home", and Gina Arnold said in Entertainment Weekly that L7 distinguish themselves from the musically similar Nirvana through the "clarity" of their lyrics. "Although the band's positive-plus stances on liberal issues may not instantly endear it to fuzzy-minded teen America," Arnold wrote, "L7 does manage to be simultaneously fun and furious, an intensely appealing combination."
Los Angeles Times writer Jonathan Gold, while finding Bricks Are Heavy "a very good, sometimes brilliant hard-rock album", expressed reservations about Vig's polished production, saying that although it suited "a pop band at heart" like Nirvana, "L7 is a rock band, less like the Byrds than like the MC5, less about pop craft than about sheer aggression." Arion Berger of Rolling Stone felt that the production's "neatly modulated dynamics" rendered the album "merely raucous where it might have been apocalyptic." In the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot opined that there were not many good songs such as "Slide" and "the performances—while certainly ferocious—aren't sufficiently varied enough to make up the difference."
NME listed Bricks Are Heavy as the 39th best album of 1992.[4] It placed at number 32 in The Village Voices Pazz & Jop critics' poll,[5] with the poll's creator Robert Christgau ranking the album fourth on his ballot.[6]
Reviewing Bricks Are Heavy for AllMusic, Eduardo Rivadavia said that Vig helped L7 "obtain a tight, compact sound" and sharpen their songwriting on what would be their "crowning achievement" and "an impossible act to follow".
Bricks Are Heavy is now regarded as one of grunge music's best albums. Trebles Brian Roesler credited L7 with helping to define "the very best of early grunge" through the album's fusion of pop and metal musical elements.
In 2015, Spin placed Bricks Are Heavy at number 249 on its list of the "300 Best Albums of the Past 30 Years".[7]
| Treble | United States | All-time | The 30 Best Grunge Albums | 2016 | 15 | [8] |
| Rolling Stone | 50 Greatest Grunge Albums | 2019 | [9] | |||
| Far Out | United Kingdom | The 10 best grunge albums of all time | 2021 | 4 | [10] | |
| Loudwire | United States | The 30 Best Grunge Albums of All Time | 2023 | 16 | [11] |
Credits adapted from liner notes.
| Chart (1992) | Peak position | |
|---|---|---|
| UK Albums (OCC)[12] | 24 | |
| US Billboard 200[13] | 160 | |
| US Heatseekers Albums (Billboard)[14] | 1 |
| Year | Title | Peak Chart positions | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| width=25px | Mod | width=25px | [15] | width=25px | [16] |
| 1992 | "Pretend We're Dead" | 8 | 50 | 21 | |
| "Everglade" | — | 85 | 27 | ||
| "Monster" | — | — | 33 | ||
| "—" denotes singles that were released but did not chart. | |||||