Burn It Down

At hardcore and metal shows, mosh-pit activity accelerates as the pace of the songs slows, a correlation that seems to defy logic. However, there’s a reasonable explanation for this phenomenon: It’s physically impossible to thrash along with the stampeding beats of the genre’s finest drummers, and the breakdowns’ focused power allows listeners to move at a comfortable pace, stomping and shaking as the music slowly infests them. Burn It Down excels at dealing out its noise in measured doses, with thundering riffs interrupting the drumbeat’s steady rain.

Burn It Down’s liner art pairs pictures of bloody-handed band members with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., hinting at the contradictions its music presents. Some songs start with a shredding blur, slow to a crawl, stop and revive with renewed fury; others open with jazzy bass lines and restrained vocals and weave through increasingly louder twists and turns until they end with a bludgeoning flourish. The only song to follow typical grunge-style soft-loud dynamics is the band’s cover of “Paint It Black,” which buzzes uneasily during the verses before detonating with the chorus. Yet as adept as Burn It Down is with high-volume acrobatics, the finest songs on Let the Dead Bury the Dead never come to a boil. “A Ghost Untied” is a haunting nine-minute epic that never drags, while the untitled, piano-laced, album-ending instrumental lays bare the beauty that’s present, in dissonance-obscured form, in all of the previous tunes.