Full disclosure. It is Monday morning, I’m on my lunch break at work, and as I type this I’m sat at my desk wearing an Ash t-shirt I bought the other week after watching them in Birmingham.
Why am I telling you this boring bollocks?
Because Burned As Witches is the new project from Ash drummer Rick McMurray, and this record comes with a weight behind it that makes all of that seem relevant somehow. Born in the wake of the death of legendary booking agent Steve Strange in 2021, it began, McMurray has said, with “dark riffs,” and from there grew into something far bigger, far heavier and far more emotionally loaded than I was expecting.
To be honest, beyond being told this was NOT like the day job, with the “not” practically in uppercase and underlined, I didn’t really know what to expect. Projects like this can be hit and miss. Sometimes they feel like sketches. Sometimes they feel like an indulgence. This, though, is neither. This is a proper album. A statement. One that is bold, bleak and, in its own way, beautiful.
“Scapegoats” opens it with something eerie and ethereal before a crushing riff drops and suddenly the whole thing has teeth. It grooves too, and that groove becomes one of the record’s defining features. “Hold Your Nerve” follows with dense guitars that seem to press in from all sides, but crucially there is always melody in there somewhere. However oppressive this gets, McMurray never forgets the song.
“Pay The Ferry” has something buried deep in it that reminded me, oddly enough, of the sort of darkness The Wildhearts used to flirt with around “Endless, Nameless.” Not in sound exactly, but in the sense that there is something damaged and haunted under the surface. It is not far off a stoner record in places, but it is never lazy with it.
By the time “Truth Comes Crawling” arrives, you are in properly murky territory. There are grooves here that call Paradise Lost to mind, and when that title line appears, it sounds less like a slogan than a man groping around in the dark trying to find some kind of answer. “It Comes Before The Fall” fits perfectly with the album’s general mood too, heavy and oppressive as though it has risen from somewhere deep underground.
Then “Right In Front Of You” feels, perhaps, like the first hint of light at the end of the tunnel. Or at least the idea of it. “Looks like you made it through” is the key line, and on a record this emotionally dense it lands hard. Not because everything suddenly feels better, but because survival itself seems to matter.
“A Spartan Mass” is a complete change of pace and underlines just how gifted McMurray is. The acoustic, almost folkish feel is miles away from the rest of the album sonically, even if not thematically. When he sings “we need a word in private, we feel you’re dying inside,” it is stark, intimate and impossible to shrug off. It might be the biggest surprise on the record, and one of its finest moments.
That leaves “To The Sky,” seven minutes plus of yearning, prog leanings and slow-building emotional weight. It feels like a journey, or perhaps a plea. Even here, where the music reaches upward, there is still that sense of oppressiveness wrapping itself around everything. It is not a triumphant ending in the conventional sense. It is more complicated than that, and better for it.
Don’t come to this expecting “1977.” That would be missing the point by miles. But there is always something special about music that exists not because somebody has to make it, but because they need to. That is what this sounds like throughout: a need. A compulsion. A way of processing grief, darkness and whatever lies beyond them.
I didn’t expect something this brilliant. I certainly didn’t expect something this fully formed. But as Burned As Witches, Rick McMurray made a debut that is bold enough to stand entirely on its own terms, and bleakly beautiful enough to demand you live inside it for a while.
RATING 9/10
