I’m not going to lie, I often don’t read the biographies that the kind PR people send me with these albums. Small print, and fine details aren’t my thing.
I did with the Sons Of Fire, and in truth, it contained the key to the San Diego mob.
See, this is their debut, fair enough, but I’d listened to it and thought: “good grief this sounds polished, they must be old hands.” It’s obvious. You can’t really listen to these four songs and come to any other reasonable conclusion.
Sons Of Fire are indeed veterans. Two of them were in Kicking K8, it was revealed in the text. And KK played with the likes of Seether, Disturbed and Godsmack. It is said they used MySpace to get their profile out there at the time.
Now, that’ll lose anyone under 25, but basically MySpace was like a less shit and less evil version of Facebook (then that scumbag Murdoch sunk a truckload of money into it and it tanked, which is kinda funny, but I digress). And back in the early days of this century I was one of millions who used to trawl it looking for music.
Music, that in honesty, sounded pretty much like this.
Those bands, the post-grunge, pre-Shinedown type if you like, did big. Big guitars, hooks, choruses, everything was huge. If you are honest, there’s not a great deal memorable in the period, and there’s not many songs that are going to crossover into the next generation, but they were good, they were solid and they weren’t nu-metal.
Basically, they sounded like “Faded”. A chorus of “she’s on her back with a bottle of Jack” isn’t achingly hip, but its not trying to be, Chuck Bouchonnet and Trevor Edwards can kick out a riff, and the solo is sleazy. It’s a cool opening.
And there’s three more that do, more or less, the same. “Paralyzed” grooves, it’s a bit bluesy too. The drums thunder, and as much as “Just A Man” wants to brood, wants to be mean and moody, it still sounds like Godsmack. It even does some Funeral For a Friend style double vocal, one “clean” and one not.
The last one of the four “Broken Dreams” flexes its muscles pleasingly, then there’s some interesting near AIC harmonies (and some grunts too, but that’s ok here strangely).
A new EP that is steeped in nostalgia, if there’s an early 2000s revival, it starts here, that’s for sure. The Alta Vista Search Engine told me so (there’s one for the kids).
Rating 7/10
