THE BURNING HELL - Baby

When I was born I was so surprised I didn’t talk for a year and a half.”

(Gracie Allen)

"On my signal... unleash hell!" If Canadian songwriter Mathias Kom had turned to his comrades in his dark-cabaret-folk project The Burning Hell with a line like that during the recording of "Baby", he'd have slipped into an entirely credible role: a year on from the release of the previous "Happy Birthday", The Burning Hell's irresistible, dark-hued folk returns in a more energetic and impetuous guise, thanks above all to an imposing rhythm section that bursts joyfully into the songs, as if wanting to take part in the "happy event" itself. Whether that event refers to the release of a new album, the daily rebirth of man, or the birth of an actual flesh-and-blood puppy matters little, and ultimately one doesn't necessarily exclude the others anyway.

The latest addition to the Kom household has fun crawling through the most disparate genres, from the swashbuckling folk-rock of "The Things That People Make, Part 2" to the Bregovic-esque Balkan folk of the instrumental "Mosquito", passing through the cabaret theatrics of "The Berlin Conference" and the fragile noir-minuet porcelain of "Grave Situation, Part 3". But the whole album doesn't stay on such buoyant terms: if it's true, as Kom himself claims, that "every good album needs a slow song or two", the Canadian singer-songwriter fulfils that duty more than admirably, crafting with "Everybody Needs A Body (To Be Somebody)" a poignant folk ballad, where his dark, deep voice stretches out softly over a melancholy bed of drums and harmonica.

The Burning Hell's new creation carries within it the candid curiosity of childhood and the sarcastic awareness of maturity, merging into a bitter disenchantment. It's no accident that "Baby" opens and closes with a baby's cry, a symbol of the joy and drama that inseparably accompany every (re)birth. Quite telling in this respect is the lyric of "Old World", which expresses with a smile on its lips the tragic disillusionment of adulthood set against the naivety of youth (transposed respectively onto childhood and life in the womb), thereby standing as the banner song of the whole album.

Once again, as already on "Happy Birthday", Kom proves himself a more than brilliant songwriter, combining in his lyrics a marked tendency towards (self-)irony with a fluent command of language, a vivid imagination with an effortless gift for writing. In the stories of "Baby", as in those of the previous album, life dances with death in a tragicomic theatrical performance, weaving together love stories ("And now all three men and lady have made the trip to Hades/ Their love burns the hottest fires to ash and sends the demons panicking!") with naturalistic sketches ("The baby ant starts as a gleam in the daddy ant eyes/ And all the ants they are going to die"), apocalyptic forecasts ("When the world ends, will it end with a bang? Will the sky turn black? Will we have some time to pack?") with improbable fetal reminiscences ("And from the uterus I planned out the world I would create/ I'd ride a scooter or a bus and I would go on dates").

The album closes with the Moldy Peaches-esque "Everything Will Probably Be OK", which finds Mathias Kom duetting with Jenny "Omnichord" Mitchell, as already happened on "Happy Birthday" with "Municipal Monarchs", though here the dreamy chimes of the glockenspiel give way to a dry picking style worthy of the best anti-folk tradition. Kom lets loose with all the self-irony he's got, calling into question both his music and his outlook on life, and in the back-and-forth banter with Jennie (who here plays something of a devil's advocate... and no definition was ever more fitting!), The Burning Hell's frontman ventures into one of the funniest lyrics of his entire output.

Amid the confetti and streamers of this closing exchange, Mathias also finds room to bid his audience farewell: "The album's almost done/ But we had lots of fun", he says, almost submerged beneath a triumphant blast of Hammond organ and horns. After all, in a world where everything is sadness and desolation, the only true weapon for survival is not taking yourself too seriously.

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16/03/2009