05 Jun 2023
Not resting on their laurels, Chinese Burn keeps upping their game.
The keenly anticipated third album from Stroud, UK punk rock stalwarts Chinese Burn opens in typically raucous fashion. We are treated to a rip-roaring guitar driven onslaught accompanied by menacing bass fuzz. Ben Rigby’s trademark bucolic harmonica lilts and vocal yelps smash the snappy underdog poetry directly into the listener’s swede. “The Wrong One is the Best One” is a brilliant tune dealing with stagnation and frustration, (something you never feel when listening to Danny’s blistering drums).
Then we are straight into a fresh rendering of long-time firm fan favourite “You Can Never Be Sure,” a more accomplished recording with added bite, aptly recreating the razor-edged energy of the live performance we all know and love. “Sun setting in the North / Tigers prowling Canary Wharf / Mankind’s landed on the Moon / And this voice can stay in tune sometimes…” Inventive and witty lyricism, so rare on the punk circuit these days.
Perhaps the standout track though is the new “Selsley Common 21st of May,” a vivacious, celebratory propeller, telling the proud tale of Chartism in the band’s hometown. It is infectiously catchy and sharp, with lingering and leering venom in principled protest. Singer, harpman, and songsmith Ben tells me how pleased he is with the outcome, ‘’It’s the first time I’ve written a song to order. We were asked to contribute a tune to an upcoming film about the Victorian era Chartist Movement in Stroud, so I built a lyric around the 1849 ‘Chartist Anthem’ poem by Ben Boucher. It’s not every day I co-write a tune with someone who died (in the workhouse) over 100 years before I was born!’’
The album is packed with a pleasing variety of styles and expressions, from the frantic onslaught of “Fresh Bread Baked Stale,” the bluesy folk standard “Inlaws & Outlaws” to the deranged anthem “Danger Island Penguins.” Themes of precarious work, historic celebration, cautionary tales, and lost love laments, all hissed and hollered with an unapologetic Gloucestershire snarl, from a band that wears its local patriotism and communitarian ethos with rugged nobility.
Bassist Ed Butcher explains that the band were unhappy with some of their previous 2008 kitchen recording efforts, and as such we can also enjoy other established hits, ignited with a new lease of life now including “The Worm,” “You Mesmerise,” and the enduring quintessential “Venn Diagram.” Reflective storytelling, disorderly indignation and genuine, boundless imagination is the order of the day with this formidable band who have played together on and off since school days, (although now with grown-up kids of their own).
Many other punk bands of this vintage get together and adopt (knowingly or not) a “punk by numbers” approach, re-hashing the repetitive conformity of their youth. And perhaps even worse are those still festering from the supposed ‘good old days’ churning out the same tried, tired, and tested with no attempt to create anything new. Neither such mundane camp would welcome Chinese Burn, who have cultivated their own home-spun and distinctive take on classic punk, upholding what Billy Childish would call ‘’the glorious amateur’’ and Goldblade’s John Robb warmly reviewed as: ‘‘Punk rock before there was a uniform…this amazing band..tight, economical melodic punk..no riff is wasted. They have the amphetamine rush of classic 1977 punk but with a modern twist.”
It is unadulterated joy to finally hear a studio recording of the deranged and loutish “I Wonder,” an insolent injection of crass tongue in cheek humour about past romance, that closes with the final bitter schoolyard sign off, ‘‘Give her one last push from me!’’ Superb smut that can only be conjured in the rustic boozers of old Gloucester.
Lyrically intelligent and musically unruly, the Burners deliver another upstart rush of blood to head with the dissonant “Timothy Evans.” A song dealing with a haunting, wrongful execution, Rigsby’s ominous locutions of injustice splintering through time once more, alongside the jagged rock riffage of Dave Brooks’ uncompromising guitar- ‘’Error takes a side, of the cast of the die…’’ Another cutting musical conflagration to complete their best record to date. Musically, the track can be located somewhere between the darker Stiff Little Fingers moments, melded with a dash of Zounds and the vibrancy of Jello Biafra era Dead Kennedys. All this and more but catapulted into the new century of punk noise with the unique spirit of rural dad-punk recriminations.
A solid album demonstrating the worthy health of South-West pub-party-new wave-pop. Recorded in Stroud’s Get It Together Recording Studio with Rob Evans. Comes in similar production to their previous album: A smart card gatefold cover, with vintage ‘vinyl style’ CD face and extensive pull-out lyric sheet, (includes a much welcome thanks to top local pub the Crown & Sceptre who have hosted many of their greatest shows down the years).
Physical copies of the album are available from the band at gigs and contact via Facebook, or digitally on Bandcamp or Spotify. They’ve got a YouTube channel, and be sure to catch them live wherever you can.
