You should see it around here, man. It’s all exploding hearts and raging boners and hot sparks, which kind of sounds like a sweaty Saturday night at the steel mill, but really it’s just me on cloud nine in the rock n’ roll sky that opened up above me the second I dropped the needle on this glorious slab of coke bottle clear wax. A new C’mon record can, without much effort at all, make your entire life worth living, so the fact that it’s been three years since their last full-length, Bottled Lightning of an All Time High, means we’ve been comatose for quite awhile now. But here comes our heroic power trio, Sir Ian Blurton, Katie Lynn Campbell, and Dean Dallas Bentley, riding in on this pale horse to save the fucking day, to shock us back into coherence with their brilliantly boss fuzz n’ roll. Beyond the Pale Horse, then, is like a shot of adrenaline right into your balls, like most C’mon albums are, naturally, and like previous albums, its beauty lies in its beastly nature, its ability to shift and deviate while still remaining furiously savage. The play this time is that the electric noise is saturated in dreamy effects, and C’mon mixes some foggy, psychedelic magic in amongst their usual motor-driven madness. Dig the catchy title track and the majestically groovy – and unusually long – “Fortress of the Night” for the freakiest examples. But for sheer riffola, “Midnite is the Answer,” with its stoner crunch, is the one that pumps my blood. C’mon prove, once again, that they are almighty and untouchable.
*That’s not the record I own, but it looks just like it. Courtesy of whomever took the pic. It might’ve been Tony.
Ok, I don’t have an mp3 from the album to share (I just got it in the mail), so go buy the album from Yeah Right! to hear it for yourself. In the meantime, enjoy an older C’mon video of them washing their van and kicking it live!
Burning Love
Songs for Burning Lovers
Deranged Records
When I last wrote about Burning Love they were flying high off of their six song, ’09 demo (and probably some other influences as well), and I promised that an LP was on the way. Well, here you go. Following the release of the “Don’t Ever Change” single (with a cover of Nick Cave’s “Jack the Ripper” on the B-side), Songs for Burning Lovers is the Canuck band’s full-length debut and if you think there’s no fucking danger left in rock n’ roll, if you think there aren’t any bands around any more who will piss where they sleep just for the privilege of smelling like hopelessness and failure, then you haven’t experienced the glory that is Burning Love. Led by Cursed’s Chris Colohan on vocals, Burning Love comes at you like a mental patient off its meds, all red eyes, twitchy limbs, and drool, and the abrasive, fuzzy, hardcore punk n’ roll on Songs for Burning Lovers (produced by master Ian Blurton) offers up all the subtle charm of chewing glass and sparring with a chain link fence. It’s 30 minutes of high energy disaster, brother, and further proof that Canada is home to some of the best electric mayhem around (think Bastard Child Death Cult, Quest for Fire, Brutal Knights, and Trigger Effect as well, to name a few). Of course, Burning Love also shares its spit n’ shit distemper with bands like Motorhead, Dead Boys, Hot Snakes, Black Flag, and Turbonegro, so when they finally come to take you away, you’ll know exactly who to blame.
Ok, it’s been a few days, but it’s December now so let’s get back at it, shall we? Might as well hit the ground running with four new entries, which I will refer to as the seven inch stretch, that time in the top 39 when we grab a beer or two and make sure we’re nice and limber for the greatness to come as we head on down the home stretch. All these entries are small and quick, but pack one hell of a punch, and at 7″, they’re just like me. Yowza.
#28 The Evaporators/Andrew W.K. – A Wild Pear
On this split EP, The Human Serviette meets the guy who never uses a serviette, and when you really think about it, it’s a perfect match. The backstory on how this 7″ came to be is quite long and interesting, and it’s all detailed in the amazing liner notes. It’s a veritable history lesson in Canadian punk, more or less, of which Andrew W.K. and Nardwuar are quite versed, and they pay due diligence by covering songs from The Subhumans, The Leather Uppers, and Les Hou-Lops. There’s also an Evaporators original, and at 45 RPM the whole thing is over in about 8 minutes (add on five seconds to flip the record). Wild indeed!
C’mon
Burning Love
#28 The Evaporators/Andrew W.K. – A Wild Pear