One of Europe’s largest punk bands finally gets a release licensed to the US, woohoo! BURNING HEADS are on the Epitaph Europe’s roster, and Victory bought the license to bring this stateside, and I’m pretty happy this fell into my hands. This very loud and heavy punk rock that similar to KILL YOUR IDOLS, or even the more melodic side BLACK FLAG. The music is super aggressive, and very thick, but the vocals go the much more catchy route, that for some reason sounds like the dude from Millencolin. “Who Wants to Know?” is an awesome try, that will no doubt be on my next mix tape. It’s a ferocious hardcore song with awesome lyrics about the stupidity of strong nationalism that results in hatred. My buddy Kevin from punkrocks.net and I disagree on the production quality, whereas he thinks it sounds rushed and sloppy. I on the other hand think it is exceptionally thick and raw. The guitar work and drumming is so fast that it isn’t supposed to have the most clear sound to it. Crank this sucker loud! There are a few taboos though on this disc, that I so wish didn’t exist. First up is the ska track, that is just wholly unnecessary, and worse the second transgression – a dub track! EEEK! But fret not, out of the 30 + minutes of music, only about 3 are tainted by the above. BURNING HEADS have a strong potential to grip onto the skatecore crowd in the US provided that enough people get a chance to check them out. “Escape,” isn’t perfect, but it does provide some scorching punk rock that does more to please than offend. I normally don’t have many kind words for things that are associated with the French (attribute that to 5 years of learning it in school and getting nowhere…), but BURNING HEADS rocks pretty hard and I’ll be playing this often enough to start singing along.

Victory

www.victoryrecords.com