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A Burn 7″ on pink? File Under:

• Records I Need Again, Please Trade Me One
• AJ’s Favorite 7″
• Sick Drumming, Weird Guitars

The Burn 7″ is one of the most indisputably brilliant Revelation releases, as I hope you know. It succeeds on every level, and only uptight jerks who don’t appreciate its subtleties have trouble appreciating it. What I always heard was that the riffs were conceived in an effort to make them unplayable on guitar by anyone but Gavin Van Vlack. No idea of the validity of that, but it’s a fine story. Alan Cage’s muscular snare roll leads the charge into the opening track, Shall Be Judged, one of the better late 80s/early 90’s vegetarian songs. Gavin’s guitar works kind of a post crossover, chorus dipped end of the 80’s in NYC approach. Like Prong and Helmet were happening and being metal influenced didn’t really mean sounding like Slayer or having guitar solos anymore*. Cage and Van Vlack really break the 90’s wide open about 40 seconds into things. It’s a new world, a new New York, and everything has more groove, and weirder chords, but holy fucking hell does that first break down hit you like ten tons of bricks. For all the mainstream praise that say, Helmet got for doing some weird Alt-Metal off timey heaviness, they never came close to anything this primal but at the same time complex. This is a great moment in 90’s hardcore, and in some ways, one of the last important moments for NYHC.

You can still see what a seismic change it was when suddenly Revelation dropped Burn, Quicksand, Supertouch’s lp, Inside Out, on everyone ears. Suddenly everything was extremely serious (including musicianship), real polished, and a bit more “industry”. Compare to the beautiful shitiness of the No For An Answer 7″ and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Back to Shall Be Judged, it has all the hallmarks of the 90’s, right down to a weird dissonant plucked part, a talking part, and a cool down part. This is a great song, because Burn is a great band, with an amazing frontman (Chaka Malik), but the number of horrible revisitations of its formula that happened in the 90’s, (thankfully for the most part when I was too young to be going to shows), is infinite.

The other tracks — Godhead, Drown, and Out Of Time, all expand on the musical themes established in Shall Be Judged. Godhead digs into the groove and breaks the 3 minute mark as it condemns organized religion in a way that I might describe as quaintly 90’s (but I feel kind of like a dick doing it). Drown has some more mellowed out and reflective moments with Malik declaring he’s “drowning in a sea of emotion”. Out of Time is a hair lower than the other 3 tracks in that it’s not the anthematic stone cold classic that they are, but it’s still a good weird groovy hardcore song. Following this Burn did a demo recording titled New Morality, presumably to shop to a bigger label that was a tape trading standard for years, its since been issued as a 7″ on Revelation. They imploded a little while after that and never made the sprawling epic lp they should have. There was a couple of brief reunions in ‘97, and ‘02, the later of which yielded a 6 song 12″ that had a few new cuts, and a couple of older, “lost classics” revisited on it, that’s not as bad as some people would try and tell you. But all of that aside, none of that shines as brightly as their 12 minutes of power here on their first 7″.

Back when this record came out, people bought records still and so there are 1000 pressed on pink like this one, and a few thousand more on the much more common black vinyl.

*(Who the fuck decided to dispose of guitar solos in the 90s?)