Revival Beach

Description

The Burning Hell is the alter-ego of Canadian songwriter Mathias Kom, and the band has been on the road in one form or another since 2007, playing everywhere from the chaos of Glastonbury to the loneliness of the Arctic Circle, popping up in bars, festival tents, living rooms, abandoned bunkers, and a mental asylum in rural France along the way sometimes they are sharing stages with the like-minded. These days, the apocalypse is no longer the sovereign territory of survivalists, science fiction writers, and religious zealots: in one way or another, the end of the world is something were confronted with every day. Its headline news, its the subject of our favourite films, and it might just be real. Revival Beach, the eighth LP from Canadas The Burning Hell, is a response to that, and the songs on the album imagine different angles and aspects of how it all might end, whether thats a long way off or just around the corner. Maybe the world will end while youre crashing a wedding, as happens to our unlucky protagonist in the hurdy gurdy-led dance party Canadian Wine. On the other hand, as in The Last Night, your last night on earth might be spent at a dull piano bar where nobody goes and nothing happens. Like The Troll, maybe youll be one of the lucky few survivors, giggling deep down in your bunker while the fools you tried to warn on Internet comment threads perish above. The postapocalypse is touched on, too-in Minor Changes, its a letter from an editor to an author of postapocalyptic young adult fiction. In the album closer, Supermoon, the characters from the albums other songs gather on Revival Beach to celebrate the passing of the old world. The songs highlight the musical diversity of the band, shifting from jangly garage rock to 50s ballads, rembetika-tinged instrumentals, waltzes, and delicate, tiny bedtime songs, all while keeping Koms storytelling as the central focus. Even though its about the apocalypse, Revival Beach is not a grim record: it suggests that, despite how badly weve messed things up, there might still be something worth redeeming in us. At the very least, we can dance.