Review Burn - Rock Royale 2010

Burn, album, Burn! Burn out the old and Burn in the new. Burn for the whole of advent and December (it’s too cold to make it without burning anyway) to Burn away all the music we don’t want.

What you just read was a modified version of a traditional poem read on New years eve in Sweden and not something connected to Burn more than the name Burn that was repeated a few times. ‘Rock Royale’ however, it begins with the second best song and ends with the best one. If the band had skipped everything in between you would have a great single. If they had kept one r a few songs (like Oh!! and Planet) it would have been a decent EP. Now it's neither great or decent, now it's a so-so full-lenght album that have way too much strange things going on to keep the standard. Burn makes music that takes you back 30 years in time, back to when people didn't know how to make albums with a clean sound and the music was made with as few instruments as possible. Cow bell and Jackson guitars distorted to a garage sounding sound is given, of course, if anyone doubted it - and yes, the microphone sounds broken everytime the vocalist goes higher than normal speaking tone, it's like someone has crashed a screwdriver through the amplifier because the sound cracks like a biscuit in the mouth of a lizzard. In other words, what we have hear is rock 'n' roll with punk sound and in the head of anyone born after 1980 only one thing keeps repeating it self: Are the speakers broken? Where are the arrangements? Where is the sound? Where are the nice and polished mixing? Or when we are on that line - where the fuck is the sound quality?

Not to be too detailed about the sound, since there are alot of people that's above 40 and to them it's nothing strange with an album that has this sound. The same people see nothing wrong with the incohesive song structure that skips around in tempo more than monkeys with fire in the ears and they keep sticking strange sticks with the guitars pretty much everywhere, like if they thought "why not do this?" and then the drums have to do a little thing too and after that there's full chaos. If there isn't one thing going on it's another that do their thing outside the actual music and this chaos isn't really helped by the fact that they use the exact same sound on the guitars every fuckiong second of the album. By the sixt song I Need Some Time I'm so annoyed by it that I could put it through a crusher and then some more through a grinder, only to be completely sure to trash it, and by then we're not even 20 minutes in on the album. The next 20 minutes is pure pain than eases first at the very end when the last song, called ...South America begins. It's without doubt the best song on the album, it's the only song on the album I'd play voluntarely since it has a good flow and sound, it feels much more alive and well made than something comming from a three man band playing on the streets of Drottninggatan to get some change.

With cotton in the ears, syrup on the head and honey in the pants you'd have a pretty decent night home, but I doubt even that will save 'Rock Royale' from being something else than a rock 'n' roll album with punk sound and strange instrumental whirlwinds with worthless sound quality. The album is only saved by the first and last song, the rest is crap and could be spared from us, because it's not like such bands as Steppenwolf, Rolling Stones, Deep Purple and Cornerstone doesn't exist and have recorded plenty of albums that sounds like this already. If you should attemp to do this kind of music you need to do something very good or very special, and Burn does neither. In my ears, it sounds like they took the timemachine here and considering everything that's already made in this genre or music style - this album feels like a mystery to me. Why make an album if you don't have anything new to contribute with?

In my opinion, we can throw this album on the bonfire and burn everything bad. We can save the menthioned songs but for the rest I hope the band name isn't a name but an actual description.

HHHHHHH

Burn Rock Royale

Burn
Rock Royale