http://www.myspace.com/burntisland
I never went to BurntIsland when I was young. I lived near it, though, in Aberdour, a tiny little village just along the Scots coastline from the place. I was aware of it. In my mind, Burnt Island was a romantic name, a strange place just out of the orbit of my child’s world. I imagined it, rather predictably, as a scorched place, an abandoned island scarred by volcanoes, or some kind of disaster. I dreamed of fields full of charred ash, survivors of a nuclear holocaust clambering from the basements of ruined houses, of lava and firestorms. It was a mysterious, and distant place.
What’s that? Why yes, I was an unusual child.
What’s my point? Well, my point is that Burnt Island is a fantastic name. That’s what initially caught my attention with this Glasgow-based five-piece. What a fantastic name, I thought. Someone has really caught the potential in that idea.
Of course, that’s not really enough to keep my attention. After all, I’m not sitting writing a review of Doctor Colossus and the Fifty-Foot Spider Monkeys, am I?
No, what’s keeping me pressing repeat on this band’s tracks are the wonderful, weary worlds of sadness that singer songwriter Rodge Glass conjures up in his songs. Just when I’d started to get sick of maudlin Scottish guitar-based singers with maybe a female vocalist and some violin for that folky tinge, here’s another one coming along to remind me of why I liked that kind of thing in the first place.
Glass sings songs which seem to speak of long struggles with sadness, difficult journeys through life which kept on going wrong. ‘A supposedly fun Thing’ starts with the line ‘that’s it I’m leaving home.’ It’s about the end of something, a time spent with someone which started well but didn’t live up to its promise. ‘yeah we did some things/yeah we went some places’ he recalls, but then goes on to detail that crushing sense of disappointment when you get to the end of a relationship- and yes, it’s obviously a relationship- which just petered out. It’s lovely, searing, and unflinchingly true.
‘Music and Maths,’ their album’s title track, is another slow-burner, starting from quiet piano chords and building to a stirring chorus. ‘I watch my children grow up and I wonder,’ he sings and you feel the weight of adulthood. ‘reach out for the easy life’ he sings, with a chorus singing along, but then the song refuses to boil over, won’t cop out with some kind of loud, redemptive chorus. Instead, it just gently subsides into a question ‘He sees the future that I have planned and he crumbles/says dad will I even notice it when it arrives?’ It sounds like Glass is struggling mightily with the notion of being a parent, and doesn’t know if he’ll be able to provide any kind of future for a child. Not exactly rousing stuff, but it’s saved from what could be overbearing, with the starkness of the images he raises. It’s not really self-pitying music, this; Glass’ songwriting voice is a lot calmer than that.
In ‘Man on Fire’ Glass is talking about life and a listless sense of feeling lost. ‘the same dreams/the same regrets… I call it home/It doesn’t have a floor for me to sleep on/the mountains do not stir up feeling in my chest/the roads do not lead anywhere I want to be’ speak of a quiet desparation, but somehow the beauty of the music is enough to render this soft confusion into a kind of quiet dignity.
So, in the end, it’s like life. Flawed, imperfect, but what did you expect? This isn’t happy music. But it is beautiful nonetheless.
Burnt Island’s album ‘Music and Maths’ is currently on sale through www.chaffinchrecords.com. Go buy it. Just don’t listen to it at 3am.
