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Every music fan has some band or album that they believe has flown under the radar without justification. One of this fan’s picks is Sweden’s Burst, whose last album Prey On Life was criminally neglected despite an onslaught of positive press. Two years later comes the follow-up Origo, and once again the band have carved out an immaculate piece of music here, but time will tell if it gets the recognition it so strongly deserves.
Burst take the headiest, most transcendental elements of contemporary prog noisemakers such as Neurosis, Isis and Godspeed You Black Emperor and churns it into a concise, aggressive one-two punch. Thanks equally to their modern hardcore upbringing and their hefty love of all things spaced-out, Origo is an album that can be lush or vehement, artful or sparse, whatever it wants to be, whenever it wants.
Opening tune ‘Where The Wave Broke’ (which appears to be an ode to former Nasum frontman Miesko Talarczyk, one of over 250,000 people who lost their lives in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004; Burst bassist Jesper Liveröd was a former Nasum member) is wisely a simpler and more straightforward affair compared to the rest of the album, easing the listener into Burst’s world yet still very much a distinctly Burst song. ‘Sever’ and ‘The Immateria’ are where the band really begin to move into their loftier territories – dynamic and expansive while still hooky and accessible, it’s clear the band have lost none of their powerful musical aesthetics in the time since Prey On Life.
Moments of beauty abound in this album in between the muscular stomp. ‘Slave Emotion’ is nail-gun Swedish metalcore while ‘Flight’s End’ is wash of sound in a damn fine arrangement and structure. Similarly, ‘It Comes Into View’ is an instrumental headtrip that invokes Pink Floyd dreaminess and even a snatch of Deep Purple in the Hammond organ-like keys, and ‘Stormwielder’ is best described simply as a killer, killer heavy track. Like the album opener, closer ‘Mercy Liberation’ is a more hook-oriented effort that brings Origo to a very complete, well-rounded climax.
The only mar on Origo’s shine is the disappointingly one-dimensional main vocals, which play too much into the hardcore convention and at times don’t complement the delicacy and diversity of the instrumentation. Ultimately though, Origo is still destined to be one of my top albums of the year – slightly less experimental and trippy than its predecessor it may be, but with a honed songwriting sensibility and more unified sound, this album rules. » burst.nu
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