Burner - "Become Nothing" LP

Burner makes bad choices. Burner does things the wrong way. Burner gets down on itself. Burner goes black. Burner wallows. Burner finds pleasure in contemplating the Void. But Burner burns through it.

That’s why Burner exists. Burner exists to propel its collective self and all who’ve come to hold Burner dear to their hearts during the Toronto quartet’s muddled, seat-of-the-pants 7-year existence through all the emotional and existential bullshit and mundane extraneous daily-life distractions that get us down and hold us down. Burner dives into the Dark and the Wrong and the Desperate and speeds headlong towards the dead ends in order to illuminate the exit signs that sometimes appear when you allow yourself to lose your mind in the pit or in your earbuds on the subway or in a car immobilized in expressway traffic while the whole proverbial shithouse goes up in flames around you and, yes, for a moment become nothing. Burner exists to help us burn through it, too.

Burner’s debut full-length, Become Nothing is a fantastic, fascinating next foot forward for a band that has a history, as bassist and resident musical “imagineer” Fraser McClean puts it, of “doing everything completely ass-backwards” with “no strategy at all” and generally operates by the guiding internal motto “Fuck around and find out.” But Burner has been fuckin’ around long enough now to find itself with a doting, in-the-know underground fan base wherever it’s managed to touch down for a gig or two on a regular basis – or scored fortunate opening slots for such kindred take-no-prisoners spirits as METZ, the Dirty Nil, Show Me the Body, the Armed and Single Mothers here and there – over the past half-a-decade or so. Better yet, Burner has been fuckin’ around long enough to start decisively figuring out who and what Burner is and the uncompromising awesomeness of which Burner is capable as a unit on Become Nothing.

Become Nothing is a wild ride, a tough ride and doesn’t give its secrets up easily. Nothing on this record was submitted without a serious amount of fervent intra-band tumult. It was all set judiciously and meticulously and precisely in place after a great amount of contentious debate. For a young “quadrumvirate” with only one caustic lo-fi EP and three scattered follow-up tunes officially out there for consumption in the world at large, Burner has also perversely-but-bravely left this past June’s boffo teaser single “OUTTATHECOUNT” on the cutting-room floor – “outta the count,” if you will – from the final track sequence to leave room for all the ambient-noise bleed, interstitial No Wave weirdness and sculpted “peak-and-valley action,” to borrow a phrase from bassist Amy Praught, that permit Become Nothing to flow so well as a proper album album. It took a great deal of quarreling to get to this point but, in the end, everyone settled on an arc that worked for everyone involved. And that worked for Become Nothing as an album album in its entirety.

Just listen to the damn thing. From the portentous metallo-Fugazi sturm und drang of the title track and the coiled, crystalline whoosh of “Climb” through lead single “Harborn” – where “the dark gets darker” and shoegaze sparkle collides with peak-era Korn punishment as frontman Deshaun Molloy depicts a raw-nerved spiral into self-suffocation by “inner demons and dark thoughts piling and piling and piling up” – and its bone-crushing follow-up “Hyena” (one of two tracks on Become Nothing graced by guest vocals from Roach mastermind Violet De Rege-Braga) on to the cathartic, sax-streaked chug of the deceivingly pop-tastic anthem “Downlands,” this is a record that sneaks up on you and keeps getting better and better and deeper and deeper and more rewarding, song-by-song and as an album on the whole, the more time you spend with it. Like, y’know, all good album albums.

Which is a sort of vindication for McClean, who was determined to curate something more befitting the term “album” this time around than Burner’s hair-raising self-titled 2018 debut EP, a blistering half-tape, half-digital mongrel that he likens to the endearingly incompetent cult film The Room due to its own … well … endearing incompetence. Released “three days before Christmas or something” just in time for the brewing COVID-19 pandemic shutdown to pretty much kill its chances of reaching anyone outside Burner’s immediate circle, it bristled with promise but hardly anyone got to hear it.

Despite much advice from friends and acquaintances in the music business to restrict Burner’s subsequent output to singles and “bite-sized bits of music” for maximum impact, however, McClean clung to his album album ideals throughout the making of Become Nothing. And, after endless internal wrangling over the minutiae of final track selection and ideal sequencing, the rest of the band eventually came around when it heard the finished product.

“The second I listened to it back-to-front I messaged Fraser immediately and said ‘You are a fuckin’ genius,’” admits Molloy.

“My thought process in my own gigantic head is I’m imagining us as a part of a lineage,” shrugs McClean, who’s played bass in underappreciated Toronto combo Casper Skulls for the past 10 years and done time in various capacities in such stalwart indie properties as Chastity, Roach and Dead Broke while serving as a go-to guitar tech for many more along the way.

“The album format goes back to the late 1940s. It’s been a pretty prevalent format for that long, and it’s the format a lot of people older than us grew up. But it’s also the format that we grew up with. And I’m making albums for me. So I don’t think of this in the self-serving nature of, like, ‘We’re making an album so we can be like all our heroes.’ It’s just what we’re used to. That’s how we listen to music. I put on full albums by bands, and that’s the metric I use to decide if a band is good or not. Sure, you can have good singles. But – and this is not to say our album does or doesn’t do it – can you make an album that stands up against all the other classics?”

Become Nothing is a serious “level up” for a band that, per custom, wasn’t necessarily looking to level up. The somewhat accidental product of friendships forged amidst the comings-and-goings of the tight-knit DIY scene in the “Greater Toronto” outpost of Oakville – original drummer Evan Saunders, these days focused on his driving role in Dead Broke and currently replaced onstage by Ross Chornyy of Life In Vacuum and Dan Aguiar from Waste Youth, hails from the same 905 burg – and the lingering micro-cult drawn together by the short-lived splatter that was childhood pals McClean and Molloy’s first band, the Knees Up. A cult that notably included first-time bassist Amy Praught (“R.I.P. the Knees Up,” she intones. “I love the Knees Up!”), who signed onto the nascent Burner lineup with no greater ambition than having “a fun, giggly time” with some of her musician friends.

A shared love within for “uncool” influences and “heavy music that’s not heavy metal, per se” but always somewhat outré in indie-hipster circles only strengthened the bonds within Burner, to the point that they’ve since become a badge of honour for the band. Burner has never really been interested in pleasing anyone but Burner itself. But that’s what makes Burner so pleasing.

“Our big thing is nostalgic love of angst and all the stuff you grew up with, whether you were Gen X or Millennial,” says Molloy, a proud product of the staple alt-rock fodder that tends to dominate the airwaves in suburban Toronto. “One time, three bands in my school were all playing the same show and everybody was basically playing Red Hot Chili Peppers and Smashing Pumpkins covers and we had an argument over who was gonna play ‘Under the Bridge’ because we found out through the grapevine that another band was gonna play ‘Under the Bridge’ and it became this whole thing.”

“You’re not a suburban band unless you’ve done one Red Hot Chili Peppers cover,” avows McClean. “You have to get that one Red Hot Chili Peppers cover right and then you’re all good.”

In one breath, McClean spills Black Flag, Laughing Hyenas, Jane’s Addiction, Faith No More, Swans, Sonic Youth, the Replacements, R.E.M., Nirvana, Melvins, Soundgarden, Psychedelic Furs, Eric’s Trip, METZ and Thrush Hermit as a blur of “college-rock/New Wave/Goth-punk/industrial” influences feeding into Burner’s sprawling-and-yet-oddly-focused vision. Which, observes Praught, essentially makes the band “a gumbo or casserole of leftovers of some type.”

“It kind of has a mix-tape vibe,” she says. “We all bring something really different and unpredictable and kind of wacky, if you like, to Burner. So we do have our own sound and it’s kind of original, from what we’ve been told. But a lot of people hated it at first. When we started, a lot of our friends who are in really popular and really famous bands right now were, like, ‘Ouch. Love you guys, but I don’t know about this. It hurts my ears.’”

“But if you mix it up a bit and you’re different, people will eventually show up,” offers Molloy. “Because it’s something new to see.”

Become Nothing should be a “level up,” by the way. If the 2023 single “Exoskeleton” was the first Burner recording to rise above what Praught calls “crazy basement bullshit,” then Become Nothing is a veritable ascent into high-fidelity magnificence for the quartet. Forged in fits and starts at various studio locales over nearly three years with the likes of gadabout Toronto producer/bassist-at-large Aaron Goldstein, sometime Fucked Up/Partner boardsman Dylan Frankland and his Tallies bandmate Stephen Pitman, Thrush Hermit alumnus Ian McGettigan, everywhere-all-at-once Toronto multi-talent Josh Korody of Breeze and Beliefs and Canadian mastering master Noah Mintz, it still coheres into a complete vision. And sets the bar very high indeed for all things Burner yet to come.

At the end of the day, Burner exists to provide nihilistic succour to everyone who, in the words of the late Kurt Cobain, seeks the musical “comfort in being sad.” Including the members of Burner themselves.

“Burner is my saviour. Playing with these guys in and out of the studio and onstage or wherever is my No. 1 outlet,” says Molloy, who – for a big guy and a rather intimidating stage presence – is a fairly delicate soul and an unguardedly vulnerable lyricist (“I just kinda black out onstage and say things and hope for the best”) behind all the messed-up aggression and lacerating self-examination he routinely lets loose in front of a crowd.

“Lyrically, a lot of the stuff can sometimes be a little bit dark or not-so-dark but darker than you think. But, yeah, I go dark,” says Molloy, who describes his songwriting for Burner as a way out the depressive mental prison he calls “the Dungeon.” “And a big reason why I do that is the bands I grew up listening to did the same thing and they helped me. People tell me ‘Stop being so sad and listening to sad music all the time.’ But I’m, like, ‘No, no, no. Listening to sad music shows you you’re not alone.’ And that’s the thing: when you relate to something, that’s when you can heal.”

“We get asked ‘Can you write a happy song for once?’ No,” says Praught. “If you’re the depressed kid blasting angry, upset music in your headphones and that’s what’s getting you through not hurting yourself, well, that’s what’s getting us all through.”

“I like happy music, don’t get me wrong,” offers Molloy. “But sometimes happy music when you’re sad makes it worse. Happy music when you’re sad can make you frustrated because you’re, like, ‘Oh? Well, good for fuckin’ you.’”

Give it a few rips and see if you’re not hooked, too. Because Become Nothing is a thrilling document of a collective work-in-progress only just realizing it has become more than just a work-in-progress. But still kinda just fuckin’ around to find out what Burner is and eventually will become.

Take the title Become Nothing, for instance, which like Burner itself was essentially a happy accident – a phrase McClean found stuck on loop in his brain “while I was walking my dog one day” after watching the film Pulp Fiction one too many times. An obsessive Googler, he turned to the Internet to make sure he wasn’t stepping on any obvious toes with his inspiration and discovered it was actually more “inspired” than he realized.

“When you Google it, it says ‘How do you become nothing?’” he says. “It’s like a spiritual thing. A philosophical, spiritual practice to do with meditation.”

“Lose your ego, reach Nirvana and shit like that,” offers Praught, not entirely ironically.

“It turned out to have a positive connotation,” says McClean. “And like everything else Burner-related, if we can find a way to spin a positive out of the negative we’re gonna do that. But also, once again, what are you gonna do? Deny that there’s negative shit in the world?”