header_image
ART OF BURNING WATER  Living is For Giving, Dying Is For Getting  LP   (Riot Season)   23.00


Still one of Britain's most overlooked bands, Art Of Burning Water are back with their latest slab of downtuned berserker evil, the vinyl-only Living Is For Giving, and it's just one more blood-splattered chapter in the band's ongoing cataloguing of humanity's eternal wretchedness. Their stuff also continues to fall oustide of any clearly delineated genre as well. Grindcore, demented thrash metal, downtuned doom, vomit-spattered punk, howling noise rock - all of that stuff is fed into the band's gnashing chaos, and comes out fused to a rabid, terrifying sonic assault that tears violently through these ten invectives. The label states that the band would be appreciated by fans of "Keelhaul, Rorschach, Voivod, Amebix, Godflesh and Motorhead", but that's not a comparison to the band's sound, but rather a suggestion of the sheer energy, abrasiveness and aggression that emanates from the music on this LP.

Despite the somewhat tongue-in-cheek song titles and their pitch-black sense of humor, this is incredibly vicious stuff, filthy, fractured metallic hardcore with viciously inverted riffs and an intense, bloodlusting vocal attack, which on songs like "Happiness Always Ends In Tears" kind of comes across as Converge's blackened, rabid little brother, with a similar ability to mix noise rock, metal and the most feral punk into a relentlessly aggressive whole, while the song "At The Hands Of Them" kicked this into higher gear and tore my goddamn face off with its brain-damaged, PCP-soaked take on Voivodian thrash. All of these songs on Living are fucking savage stuff, and much more powerful than any of these reference points can convey. Art Of Burning Water are use carefully selected and edited samples that they interlace with ghostly loops of industrial noise, brief noisescapes that are threaded around each belligerent blast of discordant, feral thrash to help build the misanthropic atmopshere that hangs over all of this stuff. Eruptions of slower, even heavier riffage juts violently out of that rampaging hardcore, the songs veering into a thresher of intricate churning breakdowns and murderous corkscrew grooves that turn an already violent sound into something even more brash and unbalanced; you definitely get the feeling that the guys behind this ultra-heavy ugliness have some genuinely anti-social tendencies. This album is just as ferocious as anything they've given us before, and is one of the nastiest sounding albums of its kind to come in here lately; it's criminal that these guys are better known in metal/hardcore circles - if they were on Deathwish instead of an avant-rock label like Riot Season, people would be losing their goddamn minds over this stuff. Well worth picking up if you're into the more insolent and off-beat violence found with the likes of Starkweather, Hard To Swallow and Kickback...