Vinyl EP Review: "Burn Barrel" by Skin of Earth

Burn Barrel

Before the review proper, it's time to announce what's going on this week.

As you read this, it's Monday after 8am Central Standard Time and you're drinking coffee. (As I write this, it's Saturday at 9:17 Central Standard Time and I'm drinking coffee.)

Over recent weeks, it became apparent that I had a backlog of vinyl reviews to get out. (Including one I've been holding back for awhile now.)

As it's the holidays and we're leading up to the big daddy of them all, Saturnalia, it seemed important to me that all of these reviews were posted.

We're starting off with a bit of a rarity here. This album isn't officially released until New Year's Eve, but here I am holding my glorious copy.

Skin of Earth is giving us Burn Barrel via a very cool imprint, Sump Pump Records. (Do you folks outside of the Midwest even know what a sump pump is?)


This on clocks in at about twenty five minutes, which drops it below the Reign In Blood Line to determine whether or not it's an EP or an LP.

Sump Pump records in the past has given us some amazing doom metal records, including one of my favorites from 2017, Telekinetic Yeti.

As Doom Metal is the redheaded stepchild of the musical world...i.e. there's no clearly defined genre markers, we'll toss this on on the pile. Like many other doom metal acts, it's slightly metallic along with slightly psychedlic and then there's this other part...this lo-fi buzz.

Though it's an instrumental EP, they lack the sophistication of bands like Kenoma. The phrase, tighter than a frog's ass, has been used to describe metal bands on stage for as long as that phrase has existed, but like the metal forebears, this album is loose.

There's feedback squeals to get lost in every other measure it seems like. In common with other albums that have been reviewed by me lately, the bass guitar takes a large part of the sound as well. There are times when the bass is the melody and the guitars hold the rhythms.

Then when they've held the course just long enough, they'll flip the script and go into straight metal, but only just for a moment, by the time you get in that third headbang, they're back onto another tact.

Burn Barrel is pure chaos by design. I know it's by design, because they throw in passages of clinical metal. The kind of metal you can shave with, only to return to their parlance of the insane.

This kind of music is the hardest to review, because there are less tangible touchstones in which to give to the reader. It's also some of my absolute favorite music.

Skin of Earth touches all the bases in the doom field, but then they also pinch hit one field over for the Noise Rock team, but they don't stop there, because the Avant Garde Ice Hockey Game is playing outside, and they have the time to strap on the pads and play goal for a period.

In a world of brutal death metal dictators all sounding, well, the same, be Skin of Earth instead.

Now, true facts time...I may  have listened to this record out of order.

Why?

Because the label had the whole track listing on one side, and a man on a horse on the other side. What that horse man is doing there completely escapes me. This release is decidedly quiet on the surface noise and deliciously loud on the speaker noise.

There's a download code and poster inside.

RELEASE 12/31/18 BANDCAMP FACEBOOK