Thursday, July 21, 2011
Machine gun
A band called Burnt By the Sun played their final show in New York City last night. They split up once before in 2004, reunited for a farewell album in 2009, and have now thrown in the towel for good. I considered them my favorite band during the first half of high school, and it was a thrill for me to see them again one last time.
I've seen BBTS four or five times in total, and this was easily their best performance of the bunch. When rock music gets this discordant and overdriven, tight performances and well-run sound become much more important. The band and the sound guy were on the same page for the entire show, and BBTS handily reproduced their recorded material. I found myself wondering why they'd break up when they appear to be at the peak of their powers.
Seeing Burnt By the Sun again was also an opportunity for me to reflect on the impact they've had on my life and my perspective on music.
I heard BBTS for the first time in eighth grade. At the time, I'd heard maybe two comparable bands (The Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge), along with Metallica, Slayer, and some nu-metal bands. Such was the extent of my heavy music knowledge. Soundtrack to the Personal Revolution in my record collection was like a machine gun in the hands of a caveman. I had no idea that such sounds could exist, and I immediately began looking for more. This search consumed my high school and college years, and it's still ongoing today.
Burnt By the Sun also changed the way I thought about metal lyrics and musicians. At the time, I was under the (largely accurate) impression that most metal songs were puerile diatribes about evil, Satan, gore, and so on. Metal musicians, likewise, were self-destructive illiterates who dressed up in stupid costumes. BBTS contradicted these impressions. The band members had some tattoos, but otherwise looked pretty normal. The singer was a well-spoken dude who dropped film references left and right and wrote (comparatively) incisive political lyrics. And for all of the brutal intensity of the music, the song titles were often irreverent.
In short, they were much easier to relate to than the studs'n'leather set. They made metal look like something that a regular kid like me could do. And I have.
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