Burmese/Fistula-Split

SonOfNun

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Oct 21, 2003
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Burmese/Fistula-Split
Crucial Blast Records-CBR38-September 14, 2004
By Josh Phillips

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Burmese contribute 10 of this split CD’s 14 tracks, with only 4 of them surpassing the one-minute mark. Essentially what we’ve got here is a group of people who decided to take a guitar, bass and set of drums/trash cans into a garage, set a tape recorder on a stool in the corner of the room and begin to randomly make noise. Throughout the course of their section of this release you’ll hear the band smashing away on their instruments, not really playing anything most of the time, but blasting away with sporadic screaming. When this isn’t happening, you’ll be treated to a lot of random white noise, squealing distortion and samples. So then, does this hold any real musical value? No, not really. Could you create something that sounds exactly like this with pretty much just a guitar and a penchant for being strange and/or obnoxious? Why yes, yes you could. Unless you like short bursts of incoherent noise, you might want to avoid this one but if the label’s description of “Khanate, Dropdead and Merzbow in an earth shattering satanic No-Wave deathmatch” sounds like your idea of a good time, well, whatever floats your boat.

1/10

Fistula follows up with the album’s final four tracks and after getting through with a rather painful opener, things begin to pick up. The band plays a decent form of brooding doom with some pretty solid riffs, but songs that just aren’t all together that interesting. Not a big fan of the vocals, a little bit screechy for my tastes. The final piece, “Caterpillar” is the best track of the entire album, starting out with some nice clean and catchy guitar playing before it slows down for a sludgy exit to this release. Fairly average sludge/doom material.

4/10

Official Crucial Blast Records Website