Burnt by the Sun - Heart of Darkness (2009)

First things first: listen to Heart of Darkness on Bandcamp.


Six years passed before Heart of Darkness was released.  It was the long-awaited follow-up to Burnt by the Sun's creative breakthrough (I'm not sure about how it sold, though I imagine it did well, relatively) The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good.  That's a mouthful of a title.  Heart of Darkness scales it back somewhat; a musical attack predicated on violence and guitar riffs galore was presented in a less ornamented way.  Gone are the samples and interludes.  What we have here are ten ass-kicking tracks.

True, there are a couple of them that are less focused.  "A Party to the Unsound Method" doesn't quite ring the same bells of truth and awesomeness that standouts like the opener, "F-Unit", or "There Will Be Blood" smack the listener in the face with.  Still, from beginning to end, there were few albums released in 2009 that provided so much bang for the buck.  As it stands today, as I'm writing this very blog entry, I've listened to Heart of Darkness over 400 times.  At least half of those listens were within a year of buying the album. I got the deluxe edition with bonus DVD and an awesome T-shirt.

For those who are unfamiliar with Burnt by the Sun's awesomeness: the Metal Archives approximates the genre they inhabit as "metalcore with grindcore influences".  Really, that's a fine way of putting it.  I certainly can't think of a better one.  Even though they do approximate a metalcore sound, there are things that are defiantly un-metal and un-hardcore, like the Rickenbacker guitars John Adubato used.  To my knowledge, those guitars were made for writing jangly pop songs like the Byrds or R.E.M., not to play ass-kicking metal.  I still think it's quite impressive.  And that's part of the reason Burnt by the Sun doesn't really sound like other metal bands, even the metalcore genre they were lumped into.  I'd even go so far as to say that no one who has come along since 2009 has really tapped into the same aesthetic.

A typical Burnt by the Sun song has a group of guitar riffs making a dog pile until the conclusion.  Another interesting element is that when the lyrics are over, so is the song, usually.  Abrupt endings are a specialty of the band. So is jackhammer drumming, courtesy of Dave Witte, veteran of...a bunch of bands, notably Municipal Waste and Birds of Prey.

My favorite track is the closer, "The Wolves Are Running".  Structurally and sonically, it is similar to "Rev 101" from the previous album.  As you can hear from clicking the link above, it is awesome.  It takes the best riffs and pounds them into the listener's face, while vocalist Mike Olender dispenses his rhetoric.  Instead of "fight or run for your lives", this time it's "fight till the death".  It's an interesting change; despite what happened in 2008, the implication is that we've got fewer options.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Burnt by the Sun was and is one of my favorite bands.  If Rush and Tool taught me that writing lengthy tracks is the best way to express yourself musically, BBTS showed me that economy is also just as potent, if not more so.  Though I'm still a bit upset that I won't hear new music from them as a unit, I think their decision to break up when they did has been vindicated in light of some recent releases by other bands I love who have not been quite so lucky.