aaamusic | On 18, Mar 2012

Despite its title being a Jim Morrison quote, Summerlin’s ‘You Can’t Burn Out If You’re Not On Fire’ is in actual fact a massive pop metal sing-along that mashes up Scandinavian glam metal, UK sleaze, and American pop-punk a la My Chemical Romance as well as a dash of screamo scene kid bombast into a strange brew that is by turns thrilling and mildly irritating. Harmonised guitars, frenetic metal riffing, a glam metal vocal style belting verses out at 1000 miles an hour, and a chorus entirely dominated by the backing vocals. I have to say that now the zeitgeist for this kind of stuff has passed, at least they’re not hopping on a bandwagon, and the riffs are solid, but I can’t help but feel that it’s been done before, and to be quite honest I wasn’t massively enraptured as a 14-year-old girl. However, if you have a place in your heart for the metal-lite pop punk sounds of the bands that followed AFI and Scary Kids Scaring Kids, you will no doubt like Summerlin, and it’s heartening to see bands with a genuine passion for what they play. “Emo” as hell, but at least they throw themselves into it and muck in with enough heavy metal still in their sound to refuse the usual round of Bono choruses and autotune. They seem to mean it, even if the scene that bred them might not be as visible as it once was.

 

Katie H-Halinski