Interview: Burning Love
Photo by Jeremy North-Lewis
Burning Love recently played a last minute secret show a Toronto’s Cinecycle – a tiny, concrete-floored venue in an alley off Spadina Avenue – to a large, sweaty, and very rowdy group of friends and fans in celebration of their recently released album, Songs For Burning Lovers, as well as their manager’s birthday bash. As soon as the band went on, the audience erupted into a frenzy, resulting in beer, water, and hot sauce being sprayed all over the crowd – those moshing as well as those who weren’t.
It was the type of high-energy, carefree set the band is poised to play a lot more often in the months to come. Their album is a veritable rock n’ roll juggernaut, the kind of riff-heavy, explosive record seldom heard since The Bronx first burst onto the scene at the turn of the century. It’s a cut above the usual hardcore tripe our fair city has to offer, and with extensive tours with the likes of Colosseum, Doomriders and the aforementioned Bronx coming down the pike, it seems like Burning Love are not going unnoticed.
“We’re all really proud of it,” says bassist David O’Connor about the album. “We worked on those songs until we were completely happy with them, tweaked little things, went over it a bunch of times until it was something that we wanted to hear. We wanted it to be the best that it could be, and be something that we would listen to, and at the end of the day, I think we achieved that.”
The five-piece came about as O’Connor’s old band, Our Father, joined forces with ex-Cursed vocalist Chris Colohan. Apparently, the merger happened as a result of the singer being a fan of Our Father, and wanting to start a new project with O’Connor.
“Chris saw [Our Father] play at the White Orchid and emailed me asking if he could put the 7” out,” the bassist explains. “I had just heard weeks previous that he was starting a record label. From there, we started hanging out more, and then one day, he called me and was like, ‘Wanna start a band that sounds like this, this, this and this?’ Like, do you even have to ask?”
Colohan himself was looking for a way to move past the metal-infused hardcore he’d helped pioneer with Cursed. His voice on Songs For Burning Lovers has the hardcore veteran moving away from his roots, going for a far more melodic approach than ever before. This method has done nothing to distill the intensity and immediacy Colohan has displayed in the past, but rather it’s proven to be the strongest performance of his career.
“I played in lots of different projects, and some things are just on the fly,” the singer explains. “I was trying to challenge myself and just make it better. I am concerned with making out what someone’s saying. With music that I like you can generally tell what someone is trying to say, with Dead Kennedys or Black Flag, there’s really no ambiguity. I intended for this to be a lot more singy, and in a way it is.”
The songs themselves have Colohan dealing with his demons with his trademark depravity and desperation. Live, the frontman brings an urgency to his band’s performances that lesser frontmen could never sell. Unlike those singers, who confront the audience by way of textbook taunts from guys named Iggy and Rollins, Colohan draws onlookers into his onstage breakdowns, making you feel that this is the first time he’s ever thought about these problems, let alone sung about them. On record, his delivery is no less vitriolic.
It’s his scathing, self-aware commentary that takes Burning Love’s savage riffs and shoves them through the listener’s skull. On songs like “Don’t Ever Change,” the soft-spoken singer appears to condemn all punk rock lifers who never move on from their post as stalwarts in a scene whose personnel change-over happens every five years – until you realize he’s talking about himself.
“I do that a lot,” he says, referring to the duality in his lyrics. “Not to be high art about it, but it becomes third person after a while. A lot of what I write about is trying to break down what’s going through my own head, my own hang-ups. Playing music in this scene for such a long time, where things change so fast, maybe someone who has a certain lifestyle for a while gets put on sort of a pedestal, and that goes out to people, and they bounce that image back at you. You don’t want to become a reflection of a reflection of something.”
Though the album is still clearly rooted in hardcore, the classic rock riffs (augmented but never hindered by Ian Blurton’s no frills, analog production) and emotional intensity displayed on the record help it to transcend its genre, adding to the band’s potential to cross over into the “indie” realm bands like Mastodon, Isis, and fellow Torontonians Fucked Up have recently traversed.
Indeed, it’s the same fusion of various styles and a certain je ne sais quoi that left field bands O’Connor and Colohan themselves cite as influences (i.e. Black Flag, Hot Snakes, Queens Of The Stone Age) have displayed in varying degrees over the years.
“I really like the fact that, with this particular band, I hear a lot of people describing it differently,” O’Connor states proudly. “People are drawing things out of it that I would never have heard, being someone who helped write the songs. With something like Cursed or Our Father, it’s pretty obvious what it is, where this is kind of [through] each one of us that it became its own thing.”
“I think it still has some of that,” adds Colohan, in regards to the band wearing its influences on its sleeve. “I mean, what band doesn’t sound like the bands that they love? There’s stuff that sounds like Queens Of The Stone Age, or Hot Snakes, or Black Flag, but those are things I love, so I don’t really mind.”
In regards to crossing over on the level that Fucked Up has, especially in regards to the Pitchfork set, the band are happy that they have the potential to play to more people than the usual crowd of cross-armed hipsters.
“I want it to be open to whoever it appeals to, whether it’s sixteen year old kids somewhere, regardless of the scene,” Colohan proclaims. “For me, I think having it available to people, from there, it’s everyone’s problem but ours as to where it fits.”
“That’s what I never liked about hardcore, like there’s guidelines that you can’t go outside of,” says O’Connor dismissively. “Some kook with raver pants and a bead necklace can’t enjoy it because he’s different from everyone else? If he’s having a good time, cool. To have that cross-armed attitude about it, that’s boring. I get stoked when some gangster type dude is getting really into it. It’s cool that kids who aren’t in tight pants and black shirts can enjoy what you’re doing.
“You’re always gonna have someone who’s gonna shit on you if you aren’t doing a certain thing, but if you’re doing what you want to do, unchanged by anyone’s opinion, and if fourteen year old girls start to like it, then, sweet. We want the most amount of people to hear it. We’re not changing what we’re doing. We’re just doing what we’re doing.”
