Titan – Burn

June 29, 2012 • React with Protest Records

Maybe it's having listened to so much sludge metal lately that everything is just becoming a blur—but I swear I've heard albums like Titan's Burn before: decent, but uninspiring and plain (and thus hard to review).

Burn consists mostly of relatively generic, safe sludge metal—your typical heavy and pounding drum lines, chord-progression-based riffing, screamed vocals, and the occasional tint of suffocating doom metal. It's nothing I haven't heard a hundred times before, to be honest, and I won't say Titan does it better than everyone else either. They aren't bad by any means, but as something of a sludge veteran Burn simply isn't very interesting—it's almost as if I can predict everything they're going to play next. It sounds like an album that should have come out ten years ago; there's no experimentation or surprises here to be had and as such it's hard for me to get into and enjoy.

On the other hand, being generic isn't necessarily such a bad thing. I suppose that for anyone not familiar with the genre Titan might be a decent place to start, as Burn doesn't throw anything unusual at the listener—just riffs and screams, sludge distilled to its essence. It's also actually is pretty catchy here and there with palm-muted chugging and such, though again even that gets old after a while.

So I hope my ambivalence towards Titan doesn't put anyone off who might think it sounds interesting. Like I said, it's not a bad album; Titan is a competent band and their music is fine. It's just not for me, or probably anyone else who's heard more than ten or twelve sludge albums already. But for the uninitiated, this might be a good place to get a quick taste.

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