SOMETHING TO BURN| |GREG WAYNE (vocals)|JEFF BALLARD (bass)|JIMMY NORMAN (guitars)|SHAWN BALLARD (drums)| |For too many people in the 21st century, music has become little more than something to burn. But for the band Something To Burn, music remains everything it was ever meant to be, and more. | |Something To Burn bridge the gap between rock and roll’s heady past and its uncertain future on their debut album “Transitions,” to be released this summer on Softdrive Records, the label founded by Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland. “When you put on a vinyl LP, it’s easy to recognize a lot of what we’ve been missing in this digital age, not only in the music itself, the lows and mids that you just don’t get digitally, but also holding the cover and feeling how the artwork flows, energy-wise, with the music,” says guitarist Jimmy Norman.| |Something To Burn – Norman, Greg Wayne (frontman), and brothers Shawn (drums) and Jeff (bass) Ballard – have emerged from a pool of influences a lot deeper than your typical iPod shuffle button. They’ve been raised on music, not the radio, and they know how they want music to sound… And more importantly, they know how they want music to feel.| |“Audiences today have been trained to bounce around and just listen to singles, but I don’t think that’s the way rock and roll oughta be,” says Wayne, “the whole album experience is lost.” On “Transitions,” Something To Burn have crafted an epic voyage as intuitive as it is responsive, ebbing and flowing with artistic vigilance and musical relevance. It truly offers “the whole album experience.”| |>From the classic rock upbringing of the Ballard twins - whose musical tastes were shaped by the hand-me-down tastes of their seven older brothers and sisters - to Norman’s guitar god meets rhythm and blues fusion, to the Tool via Ray Charles vocal colors of Wayne, it’s all about what happens when their chemical backgrounds blend.| |“We were focussed on writing a complete record, doing our best to hit it out of the park with every song, not just aiming at one or two singles” says Wayne. “This album is a journey, it’s dynamic, it swings from the super heavy ‘Start Again’ to the soft acoustic ‘Home,’ and touches on all areas in between. We just wrote what we felt and let the music dictate where we went in order to make the best, most dynamic album possible.”| |Job well done. The music of Something To Burn resurrects what we’ve been missing from our musical past, forging boldly into the future and serving as the perfect soundtrack for the party that bridges the two.| |-Paul Gargano, 05/09
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