Review Summary: No compromises with Black Light Burns second full length album.
It seems an unfortunate waste to hear the chances of a new Black Light Burns LP landing are slim to none. With Wes focusing on his latest project, with his partner Carre Callaway, Queen Kwong and with Limp Bizkit still doing the rounds, there seems to be little time for anything else. For those that have never heard of Wes' once full-time day job, Black Light Burns is a chaotic fuse of industrial and stoner rock, with outbursts of various other influences, but for the most part, think Nine Inch Nails having a brawl with Queens of the Stone Age. I am somewhat a fervent admirer of this project; having only released three LP's and an experimental covers/B-sides compilation (complete with BLB on the road DVD), they have hardly overstayed their welcome. Made even more frustrating is the simple fact all the bands back catalogue ranges from interesting to amazing. It's also worth mentioning that Black Light Burns is a very self-indulgent project: 2007's debut was a very straight forward industrial rock album, filled to the brim with ear pleasing melody and hard rocking instrumentation that showed a lot of promise to the mainstream collective. But, as this is Wes Borland we're talking about here,
The Moment You Realize You're Going To Fall dusts off the hipsters, keeping only its core fanbase and lovers of this type of genre.
The Moment You Realize You're Going To Fall goes through various stages of weird, heavy and emotional -- but it's important to mention that it always entertains. It's not a sound you'd expect to be heard from a sophomore follow up to the mainstream sonic venture that
Cruel Melody was; but this soundscape is far more interesting and, at times, superior to any of the accessible sections the debut laid out. The first few tracks test the listeners will to see if they can stick with what Wes is running with; album single "How To Look Naked" and "We Light Up" have a punk vibe and are as hostile as this LP is likely to get, but it doesn't stick to its lyrical eccentricities and fuzzy punk riff's for the entire duration of the LP, with the latter half of the album bringing far more atmospheric guitar passages and infectious vocal deliveries, akin to what
Cruel Melody had. It's difficult to truly describe all the pallet changes the album goes through, but it ranges from "I Want You To" and "The Girl in Black" that feature hard grooves, fuzzed out riff's and an almost unhinged Wes singing; "Touch From the Sky" and "Bakelite" throw out bucket loads of atmosphere and spacey jams with a tone guaranteed to send you off to a different world; while "Burn the World" and "Grinning Like a Slit" amalgamate the hard industrial instrumentation of the former with the latter atmosphere, that is both aesthetically pleasing, but a new direction for the band.
I can summize that
The Moment You Realize You're Going To Fall wasn't designed to cater to a wide audience -- backed up by the band drifting further afield with the fantastic, conceptual, mostly instrumental effort of
Lotus Island -- and I can imagine for the time the Limp Bizkit fans who liked the debut probably disliked the kind of direction this took. It's certainly an album that grows with you, and persistence brings large rewards here. Though, it's disappointing to see a band with such an amazing catalogue of albums lay to rest, the quality of this album -- as well as the other two -- make it all okay in the bigger picture. If you like industrial, stoner rock or something that fires out a lot of experimental ideas, this is for you.
Superb.
Editions: M̶P̶3̶, CD, V̶i̶n̶y̶l̶
Packaging: A fully glossed 6 panel digipak.
Special Edition: No extra tracks, but the vinyl comes as x2 vinyl gatefold, in a limited run of 1,000, with the first vinyl coloured green and glows in the dark with a black light torch, while the second vinyl comes white.
