2004-09-09
Young British band Burning Skies deliver one of this year's hardest, most aggressive releases to date.
A complex effort, combining hard core vocals and breaks with deep death growling, and Carcass-like shrikes, the band doesn’t shy away from the occasional blast beat as well.
The amount of energy here is incredible; it's difficult to imagine the band conveying this album to a live set, since all the Guinness in the world won't be enough to revive them after performing a track such as the scorching Individual Hate Complex live.
Musicianship is top notch, fast, thrash-like guitar riffs, with some strong Slayer influences, and killer drumming, the snare beating in the second track sounds like a machine gun going off, truly impressive.
The band's attitude towards other, more melodic hard core derivatives is evident in the track – Emo Assassination, and true to their word, the album is anything but melodic, it’s an aggressive, fast and furious piece of metal, which incorporates Grind-core, Thrash and Sludge into the basic hard core antics, and they its all done very well.
Some humor is integrated into the proceedings, though you won't actually hear it in the music, but track titles such as Thrash Gordon do indicate a slightly tongue-in-cheek approach to the material, though there's nothing funny about such titles as Symptoms Of Perversion.
I am not much of a hard core fan, but this album has much more then your usual run-of-the-mill hard-core albums, its aggressive metal at its best, no matter what name you give it.
Alon Miasnikov
