Burning Brides
Leave No Ashes

THE REVIEW

Strange band, the Burning Brides. You listen to them and expect a "political" band with their punk aesthetic and their garage-metal assaults that are sometimes so heavy and dragged out that they border on stoner rock. But then you dig deeper and find lyrics that fundamentally talk about human relationships that are not exactly friendly, and if you look even closer, you discover that the singer and bassist have been a couple in real life for years with children. So maybe it's all a game, and you let yourself listen with more ease, finding echoes of long-time friends in the grooves of the record like Mudhoney, Screaming Trees (with Mark Lanegan featured in the choir of the final track), or Queens Of The Stone Age. It kicks off with a sequence of killer tracks, dirty and soaked in the most metallic garage possible (standout among them is "Alternative Teenage Suicide") and continues to keep the intensity bar high until halfway through the album when, at the start of an imaginary side B, the guitar frenzy subsides to string together at least a quartet of slower and partly less convincing songs, as if it's not their best environment (with the exception of the semi-ballad "Last Man Standing" reminiscent of an intoxicated Oasis and the "boozy" "Vampire Waltz"). With this album and the previous "Fall Of The Plastic Empire", the group managed to get noticed by several industry journals, hinting at a future success; the singer Dimitri Coats participated in the soundtrack of "Suck" (a horror flick with Malcolm McDowell, Alice Cooper, and Iggy Pop), even acting in the awkward role of a very glamorous vampire. However, following the failure of their record label, the release of two self-produced albums, and finally the birth of various children over the past few years, the group—now paired down to a duo of spouses (after the change of three drummers)—has perhaps been lost for good. Three and a half stars!