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Burden Brothers: Mercy

Reviews - Music

Written by Elizabeth Rabbit

Sunday, 31 December 2006

I have to admit, I’d never heard of The Burden Brothers before I was faced with reviewing their latest release, Mercy. A quick Google search gave me the following information; all band members were previously in other moderately to considerably successful American rock bands, they hail from Dallas, Texas and despite their name suggesting shared genes, they are in fact, not brothers or relatives of any description.

A list of the ‘supergroups’ current and past band members reads like something of a gothic football team and their respective former bands, a who’s who of the nineties Texan music scene (including GWAR, the band who, if I remember correctly, featured briefly in seminal nineties teen movie, Empire Records!) But for the recording of Mercy, the follow-up to their 2003 debut, Buried in Your Black Heart, the band consisted of permanent frontman Vaden Todd Lewis, Patrick Bentley on drums, guitarists Casey Hess and Corey Rozzoni and bassist Zack Busby.

On first listen I was quite disappointed with The Burden Brothers' generic American part pop, hard rock sound. I’d read that this record had been produced by Joe Chiccarelli of The Shins, Beck and U2 knob twiddling fame and had expected to be at least half impressed by what I heard. Unfortunately, what I did hear sounded like a nineties throwback offspring of an aging version of My Chemical Romance, forcibly entered into a breeding program with Nickleback.

First single “Everybody Is Easy (We Sink/We Swim)” is pretty representative of the album’s mediocrity, which swings from the anger of “I am a Cancer” to the somberness of “Life Between”. At 15 tracks and over 56 minutes of playing time, the samey-sound of this record could leave those listeners not used to intense, generic rock, tearing out their hair.

On the plus side, this band doesn’t try to be anything more than they are. They are proud of their arena rock sound, big riffs and screaming sing-a-long choruses, and as far as bands of this ilk go, don’t do it half as bad as some of their peers. I imagine The Burden Brothers spending their career playing to half-full arenas as the support act for a band like Velvet Revolver. If you just happened to have turned up early, you might find yourself humming along to these brothers who, at least in the stadiums of arena rock, certainly wouldn’t be a burden.

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