THE REAL BURNOUTS – Blasting The Fadeout
Download/listen: therealburnouts.bandcamp.com/album/blasting-the-fadeout
Close your eyes.
The The Real Burnouts are babbling on about their tour of Rongovia. Somebody sounds like Woody Allen...
THE REAL BURNOUTS – Blasting The Fadeout
Download/listen: therealburnouts.bandcamp.com/album/blasting-the-fadeout
Close your eyes.
The The Real Burnouts are babbling on about their tour of Rongovia. Somebody sounds like Woody Allen on some serious drugs. Here, have you met them yet? There’s the one playing bass that looks like he is about to topple drunk off the stage, the dude on guitar (Pete Townsend’s little brother only without the questionable internet browsing history), the bearded conductor singing words in your native tongue that you should, but don’t understand, all the while beating the war drums, and there’s the guy in the background dressed like a Yeti. He may even be an actual Yeti. Nothing would surprise you when it comes to this band. It is 2006. The world seems like a better place. With regards to home-recorded lo-fi psychedelic American porch pop, anything feels possible, and this band, of all bands, are the sort who are leading the charge, waving glow sticks in the vanguard, falling into holes into holes into holes, emerging bloody but undefeated in the bleak light of reality the following morning.
Fast forward 7 years. Everything feels different, but The Real Burnouts are still the same unstoppable force. Still recording (albeit digitally), and still releasing records that will define your generation, somewhat perversely the majority of you will never hear them. Even the majority of the minority of you who have heard them, might listen, but never fully get it. This is no Neutral Milk Hotel. No MGMT. No Daniel Johnston. The truth isn’t placed for you on a television screen, or broadcast screaming in your direction from the radio. This truth creeps up behind you and puts a sack over your head. It stuffs you in the back of an unmarked transit van and drives you out into the desert. You think you can smell something strange, some peculiar herb somebody is smoking. When they finally remove the sack, you are surrounded by people in jewel encrusted skull masks, dancing round a bonfire that burns black fire. There is music being beamed in from another dimension, music that doesn’t belong in your ears. It is “Blasting The Fadeout”, the Burnouts 7-track offering from the tail end of 2012.
Amongst the 7 new songs you will find a collage of genre-defying experimentalism, pinned up onto your eyelids with psychedelic undertones. We have rapping (the confusingly catchy “Detuned Honky”) and punk rocking (“You Must Be Joking”). We have epic trippy delirium (“Get Out To Get In”) and grand acoustic finality (“The Spark That Started It All”). You never know what you are going to get with a Burnouts record, and quite simply that’s one of the best reasons to download them. Every album is like a lucky dip bag that might potentially burn your fingers off. There are near hits and narrow misses, spectacular failures side by side with stratospheric successes, songs that will haunt you and songs that will exorcize the haunting, not necessarily in the correct order. It’s hard to imagine that much ended up on the cutting room floor with this one – seemingly everything got poured into the mix, organs, melodies, poetry, sawdust, and bones, creating something raw and messy and honest, documenting the inner/outer consciousness of an individual for good or ill. “Blasting The Fadeout” is another welcome addition to the long, long, long list of Burnouts recordings and a record I go back to whenever I need a fix.
The bonfire burns. You adjust your skull mask. And now
You open your eyes.
Burnouts website: therealburnouts.com
Cozy Home Records: cozyhomerecords.com
