0 [From the Crates #9] Burnt By The Sun - The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good (2004)

Review by Matt Abramson

Burnt By the Sun – The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good

(Relapse - 2004)

This one is high on the list of greatest album titles of all time. I suppose album titles really mean very little. I suppose you can have an awesome album title attached to a complete shit album (also known as ‘Ultra Beatdown’ by Dragonforce) or a really crappy title attached to a completely epic album (‘Blue Record’ by Baroness. I mean, come on. They should have called it ‘Cover the Walls as Your Head Shall Explode Now’), but when the two variables operate in tandem it’s just pure ass kickery overload. Case in point is BBTS’s 2004 masterwork. For those keeping score at home, the title comes from Voltaire.

I’m not a huge fan of categorizing shit. There are really only two genres: good music and crappy music. But the million other names for the million angles of those genres are a necessary evil to effectively talk about or describe anything. So get out your “metal subgenre” score sheet. I reckon we’ll place this album between grindcore and metalcore, but leaning very heavily toward grindcore. It’s seriously heavy, double-kick pummeling, screaming vocal type shit (which is why I love it), but BBTS incorporates chopped up samples and atmospherics, a grindcore thing for sure, and a heavy middle-Eastern modal bent on the riffs (which is why I love it more) that put it between these categories into its own little niche of awesome metal.

The idea of light and shade in music has been beaten into the ground, mostly because of The Pixies and “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, but it remains a key element in the albums that I find genuinely good. BBTS kicks a whole lot of ass when they set their phasers to ‘kill’, so to speak, but they also get that you need to put the listener into a different headspace and give him a second to gather the scattered remains of his skull after a serious bashing. To hear what I’m getting at, listen to how the second untitled interlude leads into “Spinner Dunn” – that’s about as well executed as it gets. Ever. Easily the high point of the album, which concludes with thirty-five minutes of a test signal tone followed by a final six minutes of edited media samples – a sonic picture of the smoldering remains left in its wake.

‘The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good’. Words to live by. Perfection does not exist and is therefore irrelevant. True value only exists in imperfection. And grindcore fucking owns.