Review Summary: One of the earliest mergers of post-rock and screamo done in a very interesting way.
Screamo is a genre of music that is best described through the mutilation that occurs due to the music. To describe
Jerome’s Dream I would say “Hey, check out this band, their singer screams so hard he throws up blood!” or in another case I might say “You should listen to Orchid, they’ll rip your freaking face off.”
View of a Burning City do things a little differently. The pain you will experience while listening to them will be in your soul, and the mutilation will occur through your countless face-melting tears.
Named after a song by
The Appleseed Cast,
View of a Burning City’s music is one of the earliest mergers of post-rock and screamo, and differs highly from some of their early contemporaries such as
Envy and
City of Caterpillar. They are not a band that relies on twelve minute build ups to finally provide twenty-eight seconds of insanity only to move into another track of the same flavor. In that respect they are most similar to
I Would Set Myself on Fire For You’s second album, “Believes in Patterns,” but they have even fewer build ups. To draw another similarity both bands posses a viola player, but that’s where those bands begin to differ.
The album opens up with a couple seconds of background noise only to be broken up by a scream that seeks to kill every bit of happy in your body. The vocalist possesses what could be described as the stereotypical emo voice. The pitch tends to be unsteady throughout a whole word, much less a whole line. He also frequently can be found to drop the intensity of his scream to nearly average speaking mid word. There are also large periods of time where he will be singing in his high, clean, inconsistent voice for extended periods, and that is at its best in the track
Dress Like the Romans.
The instrumentation throughout the whole album is magnificent. There are long, low-key interplays between the bass and drums only to be interrupted by a loud crunching guitar. At the parts where the lead guitar decides show its face it is generally in a fairly monotonous, and consistent pattern. That pattern is generally broken up by complex, and constantly changing drum patterns as well as the tendency for the vocals to appear over top of the most intense musical sections. Not that the drums are the only instrument that is constantly on the move. It is highly irregular for a song to retain the same tempo or intensity for a minute. There is a high amount of movement musically for the band as a whole. The only songs that posses a consistent level of intensity or speed are
The Tremollo Song and
People Scaring Werewolves. The first of which is a long, viola led, vocal-less interlude that breaks up some of the heavier sections of the album wonderfully.
Lyrically the entire album seems to be largely about loss, nothing ground breaking in any emo subgenre, but the conversational manner in which they are presented is certainly unique. Be it screaming apologies in
Dress Like the Romans even though you know they will have no effect, or begging your ex for an explanation in
People Scaring Werewolves the emotional connection between the words and the vocalist is clear. He doesn’t scream or sing them as much as he cries them. The words spew from his mouth with obvious artistic selection, but the meaning behind those words is never lost in the process.
All in all
View of a Burning City’s only full length album is one that is largely forgotten in their native Louisiana’s swamps. Nevertheless it is one that should be uncovered and experienced again for fans of modern emo music. It is a refreshing take on the frequent combination between post-rock and screamo, but done in a very unique, and experimental way.
