"Songs from the Shining Temple" by Flaming Fire

a Review by Amy Lotsberg Producer of Collected Sounds

Flaming Fire's debut CD sounds pretty much like what the album cover tells you it will. It's hard, heavy, punk-ish, loud party music.

I'm going to be honest and say that I am perhaps not the best person to review this CD since this genre is kind of foreign to me. But I will say that to my ears, it sounds pretty cool. It's not something that I'm going to pull out listen to while I'm sipping tea and relaxing. It's more suited to some heavy drinking and dancing.

To give you an idea about where they are coming from, weight their sound with the fact that they also have an illustrated bible on their website.

There are driving guitars and a lot of repeating of words and chanting type vocals. I'm going to guess that the lyrics are not the most important aspect of this band. An example would be "Gun through a Razor" which sounds like men grunting and women shouting "Eye- ya-ya!" Yet when you take a look at some of the lyrics you'll find things like this:

I was in the Civil War
Rode an ostrich at Gettysburg
Got my face peeled off by Scalphunter
Now I'm just a skull with a sixshooter
I love a naked woman!

-from "Kill the Right People

They move from that to a traditional sounding rock song, "Foreign Car".

I'm guessing that this is one band that kicks ass live. Kind of a B-52s with an anger management problem.

Posted on June 17, 2003

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