Burton C. Bell is fast becoming the man of a thousand bands. Not content with the success of Fear Factory, he also plies his unique voice to Ascension of the Watchers, as well as making past contributions to Ministry, This is Menace, G/Z/R and many more. This time though, he has buddied up with his Fear Factory band mate Byron Stroud for the debut album of the Vancouver based City of Fire.
Considering the band members’ links to such notable acts as Fear Factory and Strapping Young Lad, everyone will no doubt be listening out for any similarities on this new release. But instead what they’ll find is a myriad of influences distilled through the unique skills of the band’s five working components. There is plenty of industrial at work here, but it is beneath layers of southern style grungy sludge, which makes for a nice change from the polished cybernetics Bell fans would be used to.
Opening with ‘Carve Your Name’ the band put a fairly generic foot forward - the song is technically good, but the standard chugging riff feels like it is from “the big book of safe moves for new bands”. Ah, now ‘Gravity’ fairs a lot better, sounding like a cross between an early Tool track and Cathedral it has a nice stoner rock slant to it. ‘Rising’ sets the vocal and guitar harmonies into overdrive for a tranquil but heavy offering that lets Bell open up his voice to its full potential and shows off the band’s guitar skills. ‘A Memory’ feels a whole lot grungier in the vein of Alice in Chains’ heavier moments - some very interesting vocal work here too. ‘Spirit Guide’ on the other hand, feels swampier than Louisiana with its heavy bass-line and watery vocal distortion that becomes a pretty good Phil Anselmo impersonation. ‘Coitus Interruptus’ follows on nicely, but as with the opener, feels wholly generic.
‘Hanya’ is nice and vitriolic with a fairly solid riff to its name, but doesn’t really go anywhere - I’m sure though that this is thunderous when played live. ‘Emerald’ provides a brief pretty musical interlude which would have been far more interesting as an intro track before the heaviness of the album proper. ‘Hollow Land’ has to be what most people would have expected from this project with a progressive slant to the song that breaks out a few new tricks late in the game. ‘Dark Tides’ goes very doomy in a Down kind of way, with it’s Sabbath-esque bass line, watery vocals, and tense menace that threatens an eruption that never comes. The final track is a cover of the classic Cult track ‘Rain’ - rather than merely metal-ing it up for the masses they’ve gone the prog-doom route with and acoustic intro and some nice sludgy touches.
This is an album that at first feels like it is trying to do too much, which unfortunately counts against it. However it begins to settle into itself and becomes a rather fine product. The band might be better off in future picking a direction and following it through rather than adding a few generic fast and heavy tracks to appeal to the fan bases of their other bands. ‘Gravity’, ‘Rising’, ‘Spirit Guide’, ‘Emerald’, ‘Hollow Land’, ‘Dark Tides’ and ‘Rain’ are all fantastically crafted and interesting songs that would fair much better if not surrounded by the generic filler.
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