Another review, and surprise surprise, it’s another Swedish export. Damn me, but with all the fine metal those industrious Swedes produce, how do they have time to disassemble and flat pack all that furniture they ship over to the UK to ruin Sunday afternoons? Yes, that was my normal poor attempt at a joke, but that’s just a reflection of how happy I am to review the new album by Burning Saviours. Last year the band put out as a taster a compilation (see review here http://www.avenoctum.com/2014/04/burning-saviours-boken-om-forbannelsen-ihate/), and as promised, they have returned in 2015 with a new release on Transubstans Records.
In keeping with a band who took their name from a Pentagram track, the album starts with a stripped back doom number, ‘They Will Rise Tonight’ sounding as if it could well have risen from the back catalogue of that oh so influential band, the lyrics of spirit summoning and dark magic perfectly matched by fuzzy riffs and beats with a simple timeless quality. Hard on the heels of this slogging opener is the plaintive, bluesy rock of ‘And The Wolves Cried Out’, the composition owing as much to the likes of Free as it does Black Sabbath, with the addition of a chorus that just screams to be chanted along to. This sound is even more apparent in ‘Your Love Hurts Like Fire’, a blues title if ever there was one, delivered with a doom laden melancholia redolent of the more experimental work of Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. I know, you may be asking why a metal site is referring to the insipid stadium rock of Fleetwood Mac, but I’d encourage you to listen to the likes of ‘Oh Well’ or ‘Green Mahalishi’ and see where some of the roots of proto-doom lay.
The pace of the album ups with the stomp along rock of ‘Ondskan’; what the song is about I’ve no idea as my knowledge of spoken Swedish is only about enough to mispronounce the name of Kopparberg when ordering a bottle of it for my better half. However, the music is laden with hook after hook guaranteed to have heads banging. For all I know the lyrics could be telling me I look like an utter twat in no uncertain terms, but I’d still be grinning and nodding to the beat! After this brief international hiatus, ‘Inside My Mind’ and ‘The Sons of the North’ rock out with a dirty garage sound, devoid of any unnecessary layering or trickery, raw power being the recipe. ‘Lyktgubben’ (which google translate hilariously deciphers as “Headlight Hubby”) closes the album as it started, a pretence free blend of rock, doom, and blues mixed with a heady brand of enthusiasm.
Yes, there is nothing new or revolutionary about this album, but that’s not always the point. It doesn’t break new frontiers; it isn’t the heaviest or most crushing of extreme doom; it isn’t even necessarily that original. What it happens to be is a fine slice of rock, delivered without pyrotechnics, but with sincerity, in a form that does not rely on any in studio trickery, but is guaranteed to be produced live and with passion. It is an album that only requires the band to turn up in a van with a couple of amps and minimal of kit to reproduce perfectly in its bare boned glory. Burning Saviours are now into their second decade of music making, coming on the scene long before there was any widespread retro scene, and ‘Unholy Tales From The North’ only increases my respect for them.
(8/10 Spenny)
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