Artist: Burning Brides
Label: V2
Release: 2004
Burning Brides are yet more rock n’ roll kids of the new millennium. “Leave No Ashes” is their second studio album after “Fall Of The Plastic Empire” (2001). With the flood of every kind of post-grunge, post-punk, post-Britpop filler out there, it’s tough these days to find your way through the boiling mess of information, which really boils down to one single piece of information, that’s how much copying and replicating is going on. You could cram Burning Brides into one of those same-old equations too and spare yourself all the further trouble. At its core it’s rock’n roll, with the band mixing in hardcore punk and stoner rock influences, even a whiff of blues, so that the label “sludge” is actually fitting here.
The trio is loud and clattering. The production delivers an honest, garage-y sound, and Burning Brides do have a bit of passing, decorative “melodicity” (we’re talking the upper limit of melodicity that’s still acceptable for punkish stoner flirting), which is definitely of the scandalously simplified kind. It can’t be any other way, so it’s reduced to spots placed here and there within individual songs, which only makes the whole thing more interesting. It’s precisely these touches of melody that tone down the feeling of a higher level of filth, which wouldn’t have hurt the band one bit. The stoned feel is something you just can’t miss. You first run into it, irreversibly, on Alternative Teenage Suicide, where in the chorus the vocal, over a stoner-feel riff, tries to catch the screeching madness of Queens Of The Stone Age in their better days. If that song smelled of stoner flirting, the next one, King Of The Demimonde, conjures up a doomy Black Sabbath riff, but the potently shrieking vocal over it kills any further thought of resemblance to the band. To Kill A Swan is another proof of the band’s irreversible love affair with Black Sabbath. A replica of the riff from the opening rock n’ roll rattler Heart Full Of Black shows up in Century Song, which even has an outro guitar solo based on a blues trick, while Dance With The Devil keeps painfully boxing away with left-hand retro punk hooks. The naturally acoustic-sounding backing in Pleasure In Pain confirms once more that the band is no stranger to the blues, this time with a southern “feel” added. Good morning, cow’s mooing!
As a curiosity, let me point out that the record calms down in its second half. So the first half is noticeably wound-up and squanders its energy, while the band reins in the horses in the second half of the album, boldly making up for it with an enviable rise in theatrical ambience. The basic building block of that feeling is Last Man Standing, where keyboards dominate over an authoritatively amateurish vocal, and the record then drifts off completely at the end with an interesting replication of The Animals’ guitar motif from House Of The Rising Sun, into which the band even slips some old-timey Hammond cosmetics à la Procol Harum (the song Wampire Waltz) . The band leans on the vocal masterfully here, which sounds morally broken and devalued, black, and moans like someone betrayed (with a knife in the back).
Burning Brides are excellent musicians. They come across as compact, tuned to the same frequency, hungry, and therefore real. Along the way they boldly combine different musical influences and encode them into their own version of musical understanding. “Leave No Ashes” cements the band on the scene. It’s an evolutionary step up from their debut, both in motifs and in atmospheric variety. With it the band sounds even more resolute and, despite the feeling of greater control behind the producer’s wheel as far as the sound goes, which is a touch more precise yet at the same time harder than on the studio debut, it loses absolutely nothing of the parental care for creating a potent “rock n’ roll drive”, into which it brings a convincing touch of rebelliously dramatic yet daring defiance. Still, Burning Brides are too pretty for punks, too simple in composition and ambience for hard rockers, and far too soft and cheerful for metalheads. A debate about how much of the defiance captured on tape is real and how much the band members actually live it day to day in the new millennium, especially given that Burning Brides are, after all, Americans, leads nowhere. It would most likely give birth to the pathos of whining spoiled children of rich parents.
Lineup
Dimitri Coats – vocals, guitar
Melanie Campbell – bass guitar
Jason Kourkounis – drums
Production
George Drakoulias
Track list
1. Heart Full Of Black
2. Come Alive
3. Alternative Teenage Suicide
4. King Of The Demimonde
5. Century Song
6. Dance With The Devil
7. Leave No Ashes
8. To Kill A Swan
9. Pleasure In The Pain
10. From You
11. Last Man Standing
12. Vampire Waltz
Album length: 45.01
