Burner
No One is Coming to Save Us
Church Road Records
Some bands have a musical antenna that’s finely tuned to the current climate, producing a sound in perfect sync with the prevailing zeitgeist. That’s certainly the case with Burner, a quartet whose sophomore album, No One is Coming to Save Us, straddles several extreme genres to deliver eleven tracks that are a damning indictment of our age of quarrel. Oscillating between moments of brutal heaviness and ethereal serenity, this album works on both macro and micro levels; opening cut ‘The Third Revelation’ (indeed, the whole album) is the soundtrack to a world perishing in flames, yet the lithe passages encapsulate the despair and hopelessness the individual feels in the wake of such an event. It’s a neat tension of opposites and ensures that this album is a well-balanced listen, allowing the furnace blast of ‘Accelerationist’ to sit next to the wide and expansive ‘The Agony Of Peace’ quite effortlessly. Burner have used the time between albums to further hone their craft, and the band found on ‘My Hands Become Weapons’ is nimble and aerobatic, operating with deft precision to mix up tempos and rhythms with reckless abandon. As the world teeters on the edge of destruction, Burner could be our saviour.
https://www.facebook.com/burnermetal
Review by Peter Dennis