post show post traumatic ultimate mundane

Every revolution needs an army. It needs its foot soldiers on the front line making music for the love of it. It needs its Generals behind the scenes, strategically shifting computer files into place so that when the big waves breaks we are ready to surf it all the way. And it needs its figureheads. The Real Burnouts have been heroically putting out albums from a basement in another dimension for over a decade. You can’t emulate them because you are never quite sure what you have just heard. You can’t second guess them either because they are already ahead of the game and out of sight. And you definitely can’t compare them to anyone else, because this is music made on its own terms, building its own box and singing along inside of it.

But put a gun to my head and I’ll call it “Psychedelia”. That sea of sound treading a mighty fine line between pretence and liberation. You can cut the genre with a knife. On one side you have the kids who grapple with a presence, learning from and trying to advance what has gone before. On the other you have isolated occurrences like this – music that just doesn’t belong anywhere else, where kaleidoscopic imagery leads the charge and the rest just seems to fall into place effortlessly behind it. The Real Burnouts are one of those rare breed of bands who aren’t trying to be cool, they simply just are one of the coolest things you could ever accidentally discover. Of course there’s no guarantee that you’ll “get it” – the first I ever heard of them was on a music forum, where someone had posted “these guys scare me”. Make no mistake, anyone familiar with the great and accessible songs that litter their MySpace page such as “Set Your Senses Free”, “I Put It Down”, “Burnin Up My Mind” or “Mother Mother Mother” would be mistaken to think that these are representative of the body of work. They are but the edge of the rabbit hole. It’s when you dig a little deeper then that’s when the fear kicks in.

“Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane” is the amazing title for their latest offering. It’s been a while since “A Lull In Void” was made for the ill-fated Cozy Home box set in December of 2006, and given the historically prodigious output from planet Burnout, it only seemed like a matter of time before a new record would fall from the sky.  Make no mistake though, fans of previous sprawling musical schizophrenic masterpieces “Transparent Mirror” (2005), and “You Won’t Know Until You Find Out” (2006) are in for a surprise. On the flipside, genuine Burnout fans who have grown to expect the unexpected, would be disappointed with anything less. If you’ve been switched on this last year then you might have sensed the direction the record was travelling. Well let me tell you, that if you think you knew what you were getting, then most likely you’d have been wrong. Surprisingly, only one of last three contributions to The Daydream Generation compilations, “Adreneline Hormone” appears on the album. There is no sign of either the sixties-NY-art-scene “Whenever Will I See You There?”, or the mind-blowingly comic slice of strangeness that was “Wild Sarasparilla”. Nor is there a place for arguably one of their catchiest songs, the pop brilliance that was “Psychological Sacrifice (I Think I Look Pretty Good Without One)” which appeared on a previous Your Psych Tunes compilation. Instead of the patchwork insanity of the last 3 albums, it would seem that they have finally succumbed to making an album that coherently runs from start to finish, with a shimmering brilliance of songs seemingly designed for what’s left of your head on sunny Sunday mornings, dust swirling in the rays that flow between the gap in the curtains you’ve drawn on the waking world.

The biggest criticism of “Post Show” is that at 9 songs long, that just when you are getting sucked in and acclimatizing to structure and sound, that it is over. First listen it’s a pretty good record that happens without ever truly setting you on fire. Second listen it’s a fucking great record that runs so much deeper than you first thought. Third listen and you’re well and truly stuck down the aforementioned rabbit hole. The formula is simple: understated electric guitars, great drums, and a vocal/lyrical hook. The equation generates a pop melancholy that works wonders on songs like the opening “I Do Not Want What Another Man Has”, or on “Adreneline Hormone”. By that third listen you finally hear the great songs rising to the surface like old friends – the pop-psychedelic of “I Think I Found The Way Down” , or the druggy simplicity of “Forever Change Me”, and arguably the finest moment on the whole album, the kookily amazing “Until You Know Who Came Along”. The only time the guard slips and the continuity breaks revealing the old Devil-Levelled Burnouts is on penultimate track “I See You” – telephonic leering vocals burning holes in your ear-drums.

Reviewing a record by a band like The Real Burnouts is probably about as complex as it gets. It would be far too easy to hang this one on situational hook of “maturity” like some inevitable growing up record. But at the same time it is unquestionably more of a complete “record” than what has gone before, and for those of you expecting another fix of prototypical Burned Out audio insanity, well then I’d recommend you look elsewhere. But if you want to hear an album treading the edge with pinpoint words like “I’m stumbling through the solar system just getting stoned” and “I hope I die before I grow mould”, then this one’s for you. If anything, as its title subtly suggests, “Post Show…” is the sound of the morning after the night before, an introspectively mellow daze of words and melodies. In both meaning and texture it is a 30 minute snapshot of what’s going on inside the mind behind the music – the elusive Paul Burnout – who sings you songs from the very bottom of his brain. And as he does, you can clearly visualise him in the box of a basement, lost behind the drum-kit with a smirk on his face (see “The Story Of The Real Burnouts” on You Tube for essential viewing and evidence). A year on from “A Lull In Void” and retrospectively that album suddenly sounds like it was some kind of charged pinnacle of madness, punctuated with great and often disturbing sounds like that pull you in all directions, some miniature masterpiece that leaves you wondering if this music is low-fi by design or necessity. Yet at the time I remembered feeling like it was just about too insane to comfortably digest. With “Post Show…” you know that the sinking-in period could possibly take as long, but that when it does that you’re going to go back to this record again and again and again.

Every revolution needs an army and with bands like The Real Burnouts on our side, we might just stand a fighting chance.

You can download POST SHOW POST TRAUMATIC ULTIMATE MUNDANE for FREE at http://www.cozyhomerecords.com

Or find out more about The Real Burnouts at http://www.myspace.com/therealburnouts

CATEGORIES:COZY HOME, REVIEWS, THE REAL BURNOUTS