Burden ManShadows Of The Dying
Indie

- When I originally received this record I didn't realise, but it's title Dark Folk To Soothe & Haunt You was just a placeholder. The functionality of it actually appealed to me, it said a lot about the record and the man who made it. Uptight folks like Tipper Gore believe (or believed? Is she still trying to put ticker stickers on everything?) that heavy, scary, sad and angry music is just plain bad for everyone concerned. More nuanced observers of human psychology have noted many folks gravitate to heavy sounds to get them through heavy things: the closer what you're listening to matches your mood, the better it stands a chance of letting some of that pressure leak out of your head.

Burden Man's Justin Finch is disarmingly straight-forward about it. Talking about his new EP: “Well, it comes from death being a huge part of our lives. We’re never going to escape it and yet we try to avoid it every day. It’s everywhere. There was a time when I didn’t know how to cope with it and I still have my off days. So I focused a bunch of songs on my struggle with it to act as a mild therapy. My thinking was the more I sing about it, the more I can come to terms with it.” It's honest to the point of being a bit earnest, but that doesn't make it untrue. It's also the perfect lyrical fodder for this kind of music and something substantially more sensible to spend your time singing about than most gothically inspired musicians manage.

Of course it would all be for nothing if Burden Man failed to deliver in performance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that's far from the case. Burden Man is simple and immediate, grabbing you, right up front. There's really only Justin, his guitar and a couple of effects: the sounds are intensely rich and dark but produced and mastered (credit to Stevie Knight and Dave Petrovic respectively) to deliver great crispness and clarity. Finch speaks of strong backgrounds in both blues and some serious metal, which it's easy to hear in the sparse but rhythmically unusual guitar lines. Interestingly, he's very mysterious about which exact bands he was a member of. I did a little bit of looking and, bizarrely, the only thing I've found is a Justin Finch who's both an avid black metal fan and a member of sunny, UK indie-pop outfit Fanfarlo. Full-on! I can certainly see why you'd need some dark folk to balance out all the forced, indie-pop cheerfulness.

Finch's style, now, is quite unusual, which, ironically, may be why it's kind of easy to say what it sounds like. Names like Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen get thrown around and … that doesn't quite capture it. I think if you could get a young Mark Lanegan or Andrew Eldritch to do a record of Chelsea Wolfe covers you'd come pretty close to the sound of Shadows Of The Dying. The more I listen however, it's the little things, beyond the wall of dark mood and occasional roars of doomish guitar fuzz that make what is a little EP, really demonstrate a whole lot of diversity. It's the shrieking synth effect here, the high, plaintive backing vocal there and, well, yeah, that doomish guitar, warmly obliterating anything in any way folky: that's a great contrast.

Thematically and aesthetically this is a considered and powerful EP. It would be unusual anywhere, but is positively bizarre down in Sydney, or in Australia as a whole. Even amongst recent releases by the likes of Buzz Kull or Heat Wave, this is -no doubt- a shadowy outlier I hope those already fringey subcultures can embrace and sustain this because it's very much worth it.

- Chris Cobcroft.

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