Description
Debut album from Fayetteville, Arkansass BURNED UP BLED DRY. 26 songs in 25 minutes, mixing crushing down tuned Mid-South heaviness and intense power violence blasting with the clarity, hooks and direct edge of 80s hardcore punk .
Devastating music with bleak, to the point lyrics, these are all new songs written and recorded last year after the band found themselves all living back in Arkansas a few years ago and resumed playing live, combined with a few unreleased songs from the 1990’s. This planet is a fucking trainwreck……Next stop… Dead Stop…
BURNED UP BLED DRY formed in 1996, touring constantly and releasing two 7 EPS, one on the legendary SLAP-A-HAM label, before going dormant for almost two decades. NEXT STOP.. DEAD STOP… was recorded by Raif Box at Holy Anvil Studios in Fayetteville, and master by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege. Lacquers by Dietrich Schiemann. Vinyl Pressed at RTI, 24 point board covers at stoughton. CD with 8 page booklet. Cassette with page panel J-Card.
Our take: Next Stop Dead Stop is the debut LP from Fayetteville, Arkansas Burned Up Bled Dry. Burned Up Bled Dry has been a band since the 90s, when they toured heavily and released a couple of 7s, but they went through a long dormant period, getting back together a few years ago and apparently getting right back to work on new material. Its an unusual timeline for a band to work on, and when you consider that alongside their relative isolation from the national hardcore scene in their deep south locale, perhaps its unsurprising that Next Stop Dead Stop sounds absolutely nothing like anything else happening in hardcore right now. One of the first things to strike me about Next Stop…is the way it balances musical ambition and maturity with its down-in-the-gutter punkness. The runtime of 26 songs in 25 minutes clues you in this is ripping, but the album isnt just a string of one-minute ragers. There are a bunch of those, sure, but there are also several ultra-minimal songs (four tracks clock in at less than 15 seconds!), a couple of more stretched out dirge-y or mid-paced songs, and basically all points in between. You have no clue whats coming at you in the next track, yet as a whole the album feels meticulously composed and sequenced. This makes for some brilliant moments, like when the longest track, Dont Care, finally releases you from its turgid grip after nearly four minutes and the band drops into Not Your Nightmare, the albums catchiest, most fist-pumping punk track. Alongside the wide variation in song length and structure, Burned Up Bled Drys palette of sounds and influences is also far wider than most hardcore bands. Id say the core of Burned Up Bled Drys sound is blasting / grinding crust in the tradition of Extreme Noise Terror, but at least half the music on Dead Stop draws from other wells. I hear elements of hooky, fist-pumping d-beat punk (like the aforementioned Not Your Nightmare), OG grindcore (Death Ruse could be an outtake from From Enslavement to Obliteration), 90s metallic hardcore (some of the breakdowns wouldnt be out of place in the early Victory Records catalog), early metalcore (panic chords and warped metal licks that make me think of pre-_Jane Doe_ Converge), and some raw black metal. The distinctions between some of those subgenres are subtle, and maybe some of them arent even influences, but listing them gets at how rich and varied Next Stop sounds. Thats particularly true rhythmically; most bands have two or three gears they can operate in comfortably, but Burned Up Bled Dry is uncommonly dextrous for a hardcore band, and theyre experts at shifting between these gears. Beyond the craftsmanship, though, something about Next Stop Dead Stop… feels honest and passionate in a way much contemporary punk doesnt. From the first note, I feel like the band means what theyre saying, that theyre pouring their souls into what theyre doing. So much punk today is overly stylized and beholden to its influences I often feel like Im listening past a bands actual music in order to hear whatever rare Japanese or Scandinavian 7 theyre trying to channel. Burned Up Bled Dry seems to know exactly who they are and what they think of our fucked up world, and its hugely refreshing to hear them just let it rip.
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