Burning Star Core - Blood Lightning 2007 [No Fun Productions - 2007]I’ll have to admit I’ve been rather underwhelmed by previous Burn Star Core I’ve heard. sure there where some interesting ideas, but somehow it never seemed to gel quite right or the ideas where streached out far too long with little growth. Blood Lighting 2007 is much better than I expected far from perfect, but pretty damn good- it feels more focused, atmospheric and strange in an interesting, not in annoying way. On offer are five tracks, three running over ten minutes the other two around the five minute mark. You real get the feeling he’s rained in a controlled his tendency to stretch things out, the tracks rarely out stay there welcome. As usual the tracks mix together electronics, violins and dialogue play and bizarre altering. To make tracks that fall some where between grim surreal touched ambince, noise and weird droning sound play. It also for the most part seems more dark and atmospheric and down right evil brooding in places. Prime example of this is track two A curse on the curse, which mixes the growing dread like bell toneing/bassy throb, which is slowly noised hazed around the edges. Added on top is a creepy hypnotic voice sample which is fed backwards, dragged out, echoed slightly and bounced about. As it goes on the track becomes more violent and noisy, the dread keeps been treated to be pulled apart by the noise elements, but never is. Really the first four tracks are excellent and very replayble, the problem comes with the last track which really just unfocused on noise doodling, for want of better description. Banging and scraping, sawing and whining violin sounds and erratic percussion start the track that seemly go nowwhere, before dropping into a long droning like tone and violin wale with feedback smarts. There’s some ok elements here, but as a whole it seems to lack focus and any really kind of composition skill on display. So in summing up the most rewarding work I’ve heard Burning Star Core produce thus far- it’s just a pity he stuck the last track on the end, it just rather dampens down the quality of the rest of the disk. Roger Batty
|