Art Of Burning Water | website | facebook | bandcamp |
Released on October 20, 2014 via Riot Season
Three years ago to the day, I caught London’s Art Of Burning Water supporting Conan at the Unicorn, although I wasn’t won over. Watching the semi-veterans unravelling their complex sludge tangle felt like encountering someone easily solving a cryptic crossword – impressive, for sure, but inexplicably contemptible. I’ve since ditched my luddite fear of technical ability, thankfully in time to really get down with the band’s fifth full length due out in October on Riot Season.
Living is For Giving, Dying Is For Getting sees the band cornering noise rock and forcing in to brawl, harnessing the power of the almighty lurch. At every available opportunity, Art Of Burning Water deploy refracted and inverted riffs that squirm along to the type of miniscule pedantic grooves which only really make sense to the band themselves, but are fascinating enough to consent to. Unhinged hardcore along the lines of Cold Sweat and Leeds’ Mob Rules bleeds in to tracks like ‘Happiness Always Ends In Tears’ and ‘Snake State Nausea’, and the way they execute it aligns them somewhere near the sound of rural bruisers Meadows, but they are indisputably following their own path.
Huge, slaloming chunks of metallic mass and pistoning atonal bass algorithms knock the wind out of you time and time again throughout – the sheer amount of heave ’n’ crush in ‘December 14th 1990 (Sadness Begins)’ even providing healthy competition for Magrudergrind’s ‘Bridge Burner’ – and although amusingly indecipherable during the last mentioned track (shrieking plus reverb sounds an awful lot like the wind…), the vocals are convincing, hateful and overblown from start to finish. Living Is For Giving, Dying Is For Getting doesn’t always have much of a sense of adhesion, however, nor much purpose. You have the feeling that if they wanted to go heavier, they could with little fuss; stranger, faster, slower all seem within their range too (Norway’s Staer being a good example of pushing it to the limit). Tracks on the recent Isolation Tank split and The World Is Yours compilation suggested a few differing types of sounds too, but they don’t get aired here.
Ah well, even if Art Of Burning Water don’t present themselves for immediate consumption and inspection, there’s an obstinate willingness to invent and entertain within them, which overrides that all, and highlights them as one of the most valuable and formidable bands in the pleasantly swelling UK underground right now.
