You've heard it all before
Italy's A Crime Called seem to have left out all that Mediterranean passion from their latest release by taking a few too many notes on their influences and by a few to many notes, you get the feeling that they have full on plagiarised at least 10 bands from the past 15 years.
Simply sounding like any generic rock or metal band that you could care to mention, Burn is not one of the standout or let's face it, original offerings of 2007. Influenced by Deftones, Faith No More, A Perfect Circle and Alice in Chains, the obvious admiration that they have for these bands shine through a little too much. Burn is one of those albums which you can listen to and say 'that is their –insert band – song'. Let me explain. 'My Fingers' is their Incubus song and 'Spectacular' is their Finch song and you can pretty much put a name of a band to each of their songs on this album. There is certainly no mind bending, challenging, world shattering or award winning fare here.
There is no really stand out tracks on Burn. You might like some tracks better than others depending on what bands you like, but this is no sturdy body of work with a strong sound. You don't even really hear the band having a true sound, merely just recreating the sound of others to the point where you can't believe that they have taken such liberties. But with this, you don't get a real sense of joy. There is no sense that the band are fully engaged and rapturously enjoying what they are doing. You can't help but question where all that Italian passion is in this release as it certainly wasn't committed to disc.
Burn could have been an impressive release: this is obviously a band who know their way around their instruments, but ultimately this is a very disappointing effort. Although influences that a band might have might often come through in their own work, Burn merely sounds like the band are full on using the textbooks of other bands to create carbon sounding copies of their work. Last time I checked, that is not good musicianship, but rather, average karaoke. The real crime here is A Crime Called...Plagiarism and the sentence an eternity languishing at the bottom of CD collections around the world, later to be used, when released from their towering prisons, as coasters.