Album Reviews : Burning Skies – Greed.Filth.Abuse.Corruption

The first thing I do when I get a new album is quickly flick through a few tracks just to get an idea of what to expect. Well when I did that with the latest offering from Burning Skies, it didn’t really help at all because each quick excerpt I listened to seemed to be a different style. The middle of the first track, “Warhate” ,reeks of tech-death. The slower parts of “You Don’t Have To Be Dead To Be In Hell” have a bit of doom influence in there and the faster parts are extreme grind. The vocals in “To Be The Man Who Has To Beat The Man” have a taste of hardcore to them, while the later part of “Emocalypse” is straight-up death metal.

In fact, you’ll find that almost every song on here contains section that will fit into most of those genres, if not all of them. This is both a good and bad thing, with some ugly. The good is that it makes each song, individually, quite interesting to listen to and each will quench your thirst for some brutal, varied metal.

However, the bad is that it means each song sounds pretty much the same as the others. This is a very short album with only one track longer than three minutes. When you’re trying to fit so many different style changes into such short tracks, it doesn’t leave much time for any of the parts to actually develop. The result – all the grind sections sound the same, all the tech-death sections sound the same, and so on. Each section is fairly simple and they never really go anywhere. I was bored about half way through the album, which is even worse than it sounds considering that the entire album is not even a half hour long.

The Ugly? Too many of the vocal sections lean towards nu-metal/new American metal. A lot of people will probably like this, but I personally think it would be a huge improvement if those vocal parts were replaced with a more brutal death metal style. As narrow-minded as this may sound, it would give the album more of a metal sound, rather than the new metal feel it has to it, which can only be a good thing in this case. There are some higher-pitched screams and pig-squeals in there to balance it out a bit though.

The musicianship here is top notch. Everything is well executed and no style seems like a last minute addition, the band is very proficient in each. The transitions between the different styles are also extremely well done and it’s all well blended together. If an extreme American metal band with a taste of nu- that delve into all sorts of different areas sounds good to you, then this band is worth a listen. 5/10

For fans of: Napalm Death, The Black Dahlia Murder, early-Carcass.

Band: Burning Skies
Album: Greed.Filth.Abuse.Corruption
Year: 2008
Genre: Death Metal/Grind
Label: Lifeforce Records
Origin: United Kingdom
www.myspace.com/burningskies

Track listing:
1. Warhate
2. You Don’t Have To Be Dead To Be In Hell
3. Y.G.F.F
4. Rounding Up The Cattle
5. Abuse To Confuse
6. To Be The Man Who Has To Beat The Man
7. Spat Out and Stamped On
8. It’s Hard To Breathe With A Bag On Your Head
9. Slashed, Trashes and Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition
10. Emocalpyse
11. Sticky Richard