Two different types of racket here, though they still sit together rather nicely. Don’t Grow Old play noisy, splenetic stuff that sounds like an amalgam of early-to-middle 00s sounds: elements of Ampere, The Catalyst and City Of Caterpillar all scrunched tightly together like a ball of tinfoil ready for the chewing. The first song has a great big wobbly melody running through the chaos, while the second starts with a large, stumbling lurch before opening up into something more breathable only to burst into urgent screamo flames. Burr, by contrast, are slow, instrumental and doomy. Their song, ‘Particle Distribution’, groans into life with a sound that’s part-way between Asva and Godflesh before temporarily picking up the pace and ambling into a post-metal trudge. While easy enough to get along with there’s a slight lack of finesse that robs the song of its organic flow: you can see the joins in the riffs, and while this mightn’t be a catastrophe it’d be good to see some streamlining before a lengthier release comes about. Still, not a bad release by any stretch – particularly if you’re hankering for those days when screamo exploded messily outward into the realms of noise-rock, post-hardcore and clanking post-metal.
