Let’s face it, fires are never particularly safe if you don’t pay them due care and attention but this youngish London band probably realised they would be lost in the search engines calling themselves Fire Safety and The Fire Guard sucked as a name. All this aside the five songs on this EP prove that the band are no laughing matter as the scope of the numbers on it stretches far and embraces many different ideas. If oh impatient reader, you are looking for a quick genre fix well I am not really going to give you an easy ride. There is a progressive metal flow here (very much in the modern sense), a touch of math dynamics and both harsh and clean vocals.
The title track comes in with fast and furious stumming from the guitars, which never stand still for a second and lurch all over the shop. Singer Sean has those two styles I mentioned earlier and to me the clean vocals remind of the harmonics of Solefald and thankfully there is not any hint of whiny emo crying about them. The louder parts are bellowed, some would probably call it yelling rather than singing and I am at times fleetingly reminded of Jaz Coleman’s stance, which is certainly no bad thing. The convoluted riffing and bass chugs provide a solid backbone to it all and there are lashings of solid groove here that well making you want to manically move along with them.
There are a couple of solos provided by members of Sikth and Linear Sphere and possibly one of these suddenly flails out this first track and sounds pretty damn amazing in its complexity. There is absolutely no pause as we are kicked into second track ‘DMB’ keeping the music dynamically coursing out the speakers and not allowing any respite from the listeners furious headbanging. There is a sudden patch of mellowness as we reach ‘Sululary,’ which I believe is a made up word but an interesting one. This brief instrumental bridge goes into the jagged ‘Spoilage’ which goes onto play around with both cleanly harmonic vocals and more of those indignant angry yells. It all works excellently and there is a really good melody flying around it all from the ever raging instrumental section. With final number Aphasic dishing up more and making this EP run at a nice lengthy 27 minutes this is a damn fine taster for the album apparently being recorded soon. I am no fan of the digital EP format, available ‘exclusively on iTunes’ and think they could be missing out on potential listeners this way but I do at least have it on CD and am not faulting the music here in the slightest.
The Safety Fire are most certainly one of those bands hitting my radar at the start of the year as one to watch out for. They are going on tour for a couple of weeks with the excellent No Made Sense. I expect the two band’s styles will totally compliment each other and provide a cracking night out for anyone attending.
http://www.myspace.com/thesafetyfire
