Title: Sunburn
Format Reviewed: MP3
Format Released: 11th March 2014
Reviewed By: Dustin Verburg
Imagine that Hell looks like a biker bar just off the interstate somewhere in Florida. Flaming Harleys are parked outside, kicking ash and sulphur into the air as they idle outside of that divey bar. Inside the bar, a row of skeleton bikers with patched-up leathers and long, ratty hair sit at the counter. These are the toughest dudes in hell, and they're blasting some blues-fuelled classic rock stuff on the jukebox. Suddenly, the door opens: four or five skinny skeleton dudes in hoodies and denim jackets walk in like they own the place. The jukebox starts blasting “Permanent Vacation” by Direct Effect and shit goes down: the bikers' territory has been invaded. There's a cartoon dustcloud, and onlookers can only see a flurry of skeleton fists, steel-toed motorcycle boots and Vans slip-ons emerging in violent intervals.
Our newcomers emerge from the cloud, and the room is decorated with bones and shreds of leather. They each order a tall can of Pabst, slam it down and leave the bartender a good tip. They emerge from the bar and hop back on their bikes, which are all Tall Bicycles. They mount their rides effortlessly and pedal off into the toxic sunset.
That's the image I had in my mind when I listened to Sunburn from Direct Effect. The Florida/Philly band's new LP is available on March 11th from Tiny Engines, and it is a straight-up rager. As the press release proclaims, it's a mix of noise rock and hardcore: but there's much, much more to it than that.
“As much as one might enjoy and appreciate the brute force and energy of crossover noise rock and hardcore, it is also a genre defined and owned by part time old dudes who might not relate to their audience anymore,” the press release reads.
That's largely accurate in several ways. I got into noise rock after high school, and it made perfect sense to me at a time when my favourite punk records were all sounding the same. I loved that noise rock took something I love and did something interesting with it. I've certainly come back around to straight-up punk, but Direct Effect's Sunburn might be the perfect record for me.
This is tough, meaty hardcore that never even flirts with being overly-macho caveman bullshit. It's noisy, dissonant and furious but it's not repetitive. Every song is the perfect length, and the longest track clocks in at 3:10.
The songs are usually mid-to-up tempo, and there's always a strange and memorable passage that follows every sinewy verse riff. There are noodly jazz passages, tension-building noise passages, scummy rock 'n' roll breakdowns that would make Jordan Buckley envious and little segments that will make you think guitar feedback is an art form.
The album kicks off with Permanent Vacation, and it's the perfect introduction to 12 more songs of sardonic, self-deprecating brutality. The song features spacy noise rock passages with reverberating growls still managing to drive along hard and not break any momentum. There's also a crazy dissonant noise solo, which is my personal favourite version of the masturbatory rock solo. It's a perfectly noisy antidote to years and years of showoffy scales and sweeps: each note is perfect because it hits hard but it isn't quite right.
Other standouts include [ ], which starts with feedback blooming around a gnarly, distorted bass line that kicks into what's almost straight-forward garage punk. The guitar leads are similarly almost traditional, but they add a sleazy vitality to something the New Bomb Turks might have written if they'd listened to more Born Against. This song whips back and forth from hardcore to noisy garage punk so effortlessly that I'm wondering why every other band on the planet isn't doing this right now.
Solar Flare features an awesome simple lead, matched perfectly by pissed off, rolling drums that quickly accelerates to lightspeed. This is a violent, desperate, ghoulish headbanger. Some melody even oozes through the cracks thanks to some ethereal background chords, and then the wah-wah kicks in. That warped-out solo kicks the song up a notch, and the wah-wah (or maybe it's flange. I'm not looking at the dude's guitar pedals so forgive me) swirls around the song until its nightmarish ending.
Yo No Quiero is sleazy enough for a dive bar that sells malt liquor but tough enough for a warehouse practice space full of hardcore kids. There are twitchy and jerky passages that last only a few seconds before the song snaps back into kill mode, and there's a pretty great grunge-style solo to cap the whole thing off.
The last song on the record, Thoughts of Honey, boasts a riff that's almost bright and bouncy: or it would be if it didn't sound so downright evil. This song also features the only real singing on the record, and it's almost scarier than the rest of the album's violent yelps: it's like an echoey melody coming from a dirty shower in the next room, haunting the rest of the song's brutal punk noisescape. The album ends on a silly noise fuckaround, like Direct Effect likely does at the end of the show right before they thrown down their instruments for the night.
I was expecting to like Sunburn, but I was surprised by how much I liked it. As I said previously, this is almost the perfect record for me. It knows how to use fast songs (a thrashy number is the perfect punctuation to two or three uptempo ragers), it's a masterpiece of guitar feedback and it knows how to fuse 80s American hardcore with more modern fare like Cursed and All Teeth: and that's all wrapped in a blanket of 90s-style AmRep noise rock. There's a little passage with blast beats, and another one that features slide guitar over a gnarly breakdown. The band shows that they could have a crazy-long, squealin' solo in every single song, but they have enough taste to use that power wisely. I am impressed.
If you like Ceremony, Fucked Up or Pissed Jeans, check it out. If you like old AFI and the Nerve Agents, check it out. If you always thought the Bronx could stand to sound a little angrier and recruit Greg Ginn for a lead guitar player, check it out. If you like Rye Coalition, Big Black or the Jesus Lizard, check it out. Even if you love Every Time I Die but “don't like punk,” check it out.
Basically, Sunburn should scratch your itch for interesting, aggressive music no matter what. Unless you're really into technical death metal: in that case, neither I nor Direct Effect can help you.
You can follow Dustin on Twitter: @DustinVerburg
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