Burial Party - Please, Electric Move Slow

Musical labels have always intrigued me. What are the boundaries from a Metal band to a punk rock one? What are the boundaries which describe the differences from a Thrash Metal Band to a Hardcore? Yeah, they are slight, subtle, and yet, personal, not objective at all. Quicksand ground to step on. The thing gets even more trickier when the band in question do all the mixing as a conscient act. It seems that they thought “I’ll trick up all reviewers with my album”! In fact, Burial Party did that with flying colors.

To begin with, Burial Party is a name that reminds a Black/Death Metal band, not a post-punk band – to say the most obvious for now. And the worst “Please, Electric Move Slow” is an EP with only four tracks. Okay, to some it may be enough, but not for me. My luck is that “Please, Electric Move Slow” is monolythical in those four tracks. One for the post-punk theory. Strictly speaking, Burial Party do a mix of punk influences adding some Metal in it. The problem is that Metal addiction influences a lot the result making it almost an experimental effort. One against the post-punk theory. Musicwise, it is no overreaction to say that “Please, Electric Move Slow” may be considered an experimental album. But hold your horses! Let’s not jump to conclusions. If we go to post-punk features, the guitars showed in “Black Stripes” are post-punk because they use simple single structures but using simple phrases. Though in the end the thing changes a little with a stop to come againg with some bass lines. Let’s remember that U2 used that a lot in their first efforts. Two for post-punk theory. But the following track, “Crisis Actor” opens up with another melodic and harmonic structure reminding a lot to Modern Metal, specially vocals. The fact is Burial Party use little chordly guitars rather than guitar phrases. This is what happens again in “Digital Green Boots” and its inflaming war cry and incendiary instrumentals. “Digital Green Boots” is definitely more punk than post-punk. To make things even more difficult, “Soft Chains” is the hardest track of all with a hardcore grip. Yeah, the life of a reviewer is not easy these days.