Originally written by Sasha Horn
I’ve sounded the siren at least a dozen times in honor of classic American Speed/Thrash while listening to Burn, and that’s at least one time per tune, at least. So if the thrown-back and rehashed has got you in dire straits as of lately (the surprisingly good Warbringer excluded), then consider an album like this the muscle behind an upswing, courtesy of Denver’s own blazing saddles.
These are a few of my favorite things: The sweet, poignant drift of urinal cake sprayed with genuine draft. The touch in the face from the windmill of another. The glaze-over with a fine film of Marlboro encased in my own sweat. Soaked and soiled. I spent the summers of my infancy seeking out these wonderful circumstances. It was always an album with Burn‘s kind of fervor that led me to a show that captured that sort of sensory overload, and I’m dead-set on spending an upcoming third-life crisis with Havok Inc. in search of another. Sanchez, Chavez, and Santos have officially put the panic back in Hispanic and I’m gonna get all that is to be gotten from an album like this, which just happens to rub off on me like that stank of my youth.
It’s pretty simple. Havok’s chops are top-notch, and their creative-within-borders style of songwriting sidesteps the beer-bonged and bong-toked dufus Thrash Metal. That stuff gets cranked out at an alarming rate. This stuff right here doesn’t get cranked out enough. So do yourself and your scene a favor and buy this disc, and then open up the case like a hatch, and play it loud, louder, loudest, so that the world can hear what I can best describe as (it excites me as much to spell it out as it does to hope that you can hear it too) the tight snarl of Atrophy’s Socialized Hate going head to head with the quirkiness of Megadeth’s Rust In Peace. Holy ’88-’90! It’s evident in the first ten minutes, from “The Root Of Evil” on into “Path To Nowhere”, that this crew can gallop, high-tail, sprint, and pummel in this particular way, and then on through the other forty. Not to mention putting a guitar or two through the wood chipper (“Identity Theft”). And there are times that Havok derail with an even heavier west-coast lean ala good, old Metallica (the ballady breakdown in the aforementioned “Identity Theft”), and good, old Testament (the grooved-out verses in “Morbid Symmetry”). I meant derail in the best sense, by the way; high-octane gone slightly awry; the kind of wonderful tragedy that you run out in front of, openly inviting. Burn‘s coastal-to-midwestern stew is the funnest re-Thrashed game of connect-the-dots in quite some time, and it’ll keep me listening all the way up to my year-end list.
Put yourself in the harm’s way of Havok.
