Band:	Burnsred
Album:	Burns Red
Style:	Doom metal, Post-metal, Progressive sludge metal
Release date:	2011

01. Mirror
02. Standby
03. Cleanse CMXCIX
04. A Sentence
05. Scissors
06. Beartrap

Burns Red is a blackened, sludgy, sometimes posty, doom outfit (somewhere a BitterCOld, minding its own business, just did this) and they've proved that they mean business with their self-titled debut. What kind of business? Pretty serious business. This is a pretty good album.

There are plenty of moments for you masochists out there looking for some ugliness, plenty of almost math-rock-sounding riffing and time signature changing, plenty of moroseness, and some pretty catchy melodies on top. The album is compulsively anti-cliché. And that's cool.

But it does have its share of hitches. The production, for example, isolates the drums too much; through the entire album, the cymbals, in particular, poke out awkwardly. I also wish the bass had been brought up just a smidge. The vocals are wishy-washy as well. If they don't enter at bizarre, counterintuitive times, they have a tendency to overstay their welcome, throatily dragging their cords, and tangling up the riff progression. Which can be annoying.

To put it simply, this is an erratic album. It has brilliant moments, but since what makes it interesting?the amount of riff and style variation--is also what prevents it from ever feeling very cohesive, that's all it has. Burns Red's experimentation frequently comes close to undermining the album's atmospherics and grooves, and that's a problem. Nothing here can be called wankish, that's for sure, but, for me, its rhythms and melodies are often spoiled by its left hooks. And, considering the quality of the guitar work on this, that's the source of some disappointment.

Nevertheless, this album comes really close to being great. If you like your tunes moody and diverse, it's worth a quick check out.

Highlights: "Scissors", "Beartrap", and "Cleanse CMXCIX"