Bushfire, Black Ash Sunday: It’s the Burl of the Curl
Heavy blues bruisers Bushfire make their home in Darmstadt, Germany. It’s the same town that produced stonerly trio Wight, with whom Bushfire took to the road for the “Malakas of the Universe” tour at the end of 2011. To date, Bushfire’s self-issued Black Ash Sunday (2010; more recently put out on vinyl) is their only official release, following three demos with nearly an hour’s worth of thickened riff rock and burly tones. The five-piece have undergone some lineup changes since, but on Black Ash Sunday, the unit of guitarists Miguel Pereira and Marcus Bischoff, vocalist Bill Brown, bassist Thomas Glaser (since replaced by Nick K.) and drummer Tom Hoffmann works well together, clearly having learned something about their sound and what they wanted to accomplish musically through their extensive demoing process. Taken as a whole, the album is cohesive, if long at 13 tracks, and showcases a marked Clutch influence, both in Brown’s vocal patterning and in the riff work of Pereira and Bischoff, whose bouncing fuzz prevails on songs like “Black Ash Sunday,” which follows the swamp blues intro “Midsummer Porch View.” The overall sound of the band is full, and as a standalone singer, Brown earns his spot, even if he gives way every now and again to the lower-mouth “stoner rock voice,” which ups the dudely quotient in the band’s overall vibe and ultimately takes away from the musical variety.
Germany being a hotbed of heavy psychedelia, one might expect those elements to show up in Bushfire’s sound, but they don’t. Even though a cut like “The Fiend” has a slower, groovier, more open feel to its verse, it’s grounded stylistically, and that current runs strong throughout Black Ash Sunday. That has its ups and downs as regards the overall listening experience, in that even a song like “Hundredsixtysix,” which has a break in the middle from the forward-pushed riffing, is back to it soon enough, and though Bushfire prove to work quite well within the formula – in that song in particular adding a kind of Helmet-style crunch to the overall sound without sacrificing melody in the chorus – it’s too easy as the record plays out to lose sight of which tracks stand out for what reasons. Fans of Washington D.C. heavy rockers Borracho will recognize a lot of what Bushfire are doing here, tonally and in terms of approach – though it’s worth noting that Borracho’s Splitting Sky was a 2011 release and this is 2010 – and ultimately, Black Ash Sunday falls prey to a similar first-album misstep as that record did: too much of a good thing. The ripping biker metal solo on “Little Man” wastes not one move in kicking as much ass as possible, and the late-album boogie of “Forget Regret” is a high point of the whole listening experience – one of the best riffs here, hands down – but getting there feels like twice the trip by the time you arrive. It’s not necessarily a question of songwriting as one of abundance.
Production is a part of it, in that even when Bushfire’s songs are dynamic – as “Forget Regret” and “You Should Have Known” certainly are – they don’t sound it, but Black Ash Sunday is crisp and clear and for a band self-releasing their debut, I wouldn’t ask more of it than that. As the album is virtually broken in half by the aptly-titled “Interlude,” which is a minute-plus return to the humid climes of “Midsummer Porch View” nestled between “Little Man” and “Useless in So Many Ways” – itself the longest song on Black Ash Sunday and perhaps the most stylistically effective – it seems to make more sense to take Bushfire in the halves they present as a means of better getting to know the material. That’s easier on vinyl, but one finds with the LP version, four of the songs have been cut for time, and Bushfire, by all accounts, chose wisely the ones to leave off. If that even subconsciously speaks to some level of editorial thinking on the part of the band, it bodes well for the follow-up to Black Ash Sunday, which on has an unquestionable flow but gives up some of the impact of its individual songs to get it. There are all kinds of reasons that happens, particularly for a band making their first record with a collection of quality songs who are excited to get their material out there, who’ve just recorded and who are hungry to have as much heard as possible, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, with a vinyl release of Black Ash Sunday now under their collective belt, Bushfire didn’t emerge next time around with a tightness of presentation to match that which is already present in the performances here.
