Cold Burns

To hear John Milchem tell it, he just wants to rock. Maybe not a nobly ambitious goal, but one that no respectable person can be scorned for. Good grooves will always triumph; there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with being a dirty rock primate so long as you’re not insultingly stupid or trite. It’s what separates AC/DC from KISS. Neither one ever wrote a song that’ll inspire a lucid and well-developed graduate thesis, yet one is clearly more insipid than the other. Cold Burns won’t make you any dumber and offers more than a small number of thrills, but it won’t change the world. And I doubt Milchem cares.Cold Burns' rock erupts from the gut. Milchem’s got a slur-in-a-megaphone vocal style that Julian Casablancas mastered so well and the musicians have the good time grooves of Eagles of Death Metal and the precise detailing with sandpaper guitars that made the Hives stars. But more than any modern impresarios of grime rock, they recall the savageness of the Stooges, the gnarled but tongue-in-cheek attitude of the Dictators, the trashy punk blues of Jon Spencer outfits (Blues Explosion and Pussy Galore), the sloppy power pop mastery of early Cars and the don’t-give-a-damn mentality of late 70s punk pioneers such as Dead Boys. Add to that a dash of slow burn grunge and bellbottoms crotch rock and you might have an idea what to expect. But expectations will still lead to surprise: Cold Burns is short on anthemic hooks but unpredictable chord changes and modulated guitar tuning keep things lively to the last note.The album opens with a pair of dual guitar assaults with the messy enthusiasm of proto-punk’s best groundbreakers. “Ghost Witness” and “Chicken Fly” ignite the record, two jittery and angular little numbers with no room for excess. Four step garage guitars and drums open up “Left Hand Endeavor”; a beefy hook and strong vocal performance makes it one of the album’s catchiest moments. “More” has the sort of coarse swagger that streamed from Mick Jagger’s pores circa Exile on Main Street. “Yr. Punk Rock” builds and builds to a seething squalor across the smeared-plaster bridge. And “Pink/Black” is one of the album’s most intense and livid moments—impeccable start-stop rhythms dominate throughout. Not a second is wasted; even when they slow it down, the music still bleeds. There’s no room (or patience) for a ballad or an epic on this record—the five-minute closer, “P.B.,” has a muscular “exorcism coda” and static burn, but don’t let that fool you.Of course, fooling you is something that Starvin Hungry will likely never do. Milchem’s lyrical diet of crassness, double entendres, chest thumping and provocations are all point blank; there are metaphors to be sure, but considering the band’s aesthetic, I doubt the references are oblique or ethereal. Whatever takes it back to the bicep and the bulge, I guess. Stacked against each other, not everything he says makes much sense (and contextually…forget about it), but the visceral charge hits home. “Let me commit my crime,” he huffs across the refrain of “Left Hand Endeavor”; he fervently begs to, “Let the dead dog lie,” before his ending growl, “Suck it,” on “Pink/Black.” On a more subtle, intellectually biased record, these declarations might be groan-worthy. In the midst of a down-and-dirty straight-up rock record, they fit in just fine.The band knocked out this recording in a short time but Milchem then tinkered with it for a year or more after that. Don’t fret: it hasn’t been overproduced and the music is as raw and noisy as we could hope for. But the album does suffer a bit from the been-there-done-that syndrome. Scott Mucklow’s opening riff on “Chicken Fly” is straight out of the Ramones’ playbook. References to a hanging tree on “Well Below the Bottom” exposes their second-tier Queens of the Stone Age machinations. And “The Hammer” has Spencer Warren and Dave Lavoie knocking out the same descending martial drum and bass workouts found on Green Day’s “Hitchin’ a Ride.” They’re minor grievances, but they do remind us that Starvin Hungry isn’t yet at the top of their genre.Even though they’re the sort of rock band that can and will mix it up with the tempos, they’re better at the quicker punk numbers than the slower, howlin’-blues ones. The two weakest tracks, “Well Below the Bottom” and “The Triumph of Non,” both feel too lifeless and uninspired, potentially intriguing breaks reduced to filler. But filler for them simply means having too many options. “Bottom” breaks up the heavy firepower of “Pink/Black” and “Hammer”; “Non” just seems less appealing because it follows the much better skunk rock strut of “More.” The tracks aren’t out of place; this is a band that knows what it’s doing.Cold Burns has the sort of “erratic focus” that a good album should have—a singular vibe to the entire recording but without ever falling into the rut of predictability and sameness. It might only be their second full length, but they’re veterans who’ve been around long enough to have absorbed their influences into the bloodstream instead of simply tattooing them across the skin. They might not blow you away, but they’re a bullshit-free rock band anyone can relate to. When someone goes against better instincts and plays something like Guitar Hero or Rock Band or whatever, Starvin Hungry is the sort of group he/she pretends to lead.