Remember the glory days of the various artist CD? While every dickwad and their dog owned titles from the Big Shiny Tunes series, the soundtrack to my own adolescent misadventures was Survival of the Fattest and Punk-o-Rama. What followed later, in the early 2000s, was an endless string of DIY comps packed to the gills with contributions of dubious quality in the name cutting costs and showcasing as many acts as technologically possible. And then iPods became the norm and all those inferior comps began to fill up landfills across North America, and beyond.
Luckily, House of Burners is in the tradition of solid compilation CDs that made me and my music starved pals in backwoods Canadian towns in the 90s go apeshit. Chocked full of choice cuts from the heaviest, trippiest, sludgiest street rockers Canada has to offer, this debut release from Shooting Guns’ Pre-Rock Records is sure to be all over the campus/community radio charts like a bad case of acne on that kid who ate too many chocolate bars and didn’t wash his face. With a new track from Shooting Guns, as well as tunes from local Juno nominees Mahogany Frog, and Stylus favourites the Pack AD, Powder Blue, Bison, and Krang, House of Burners is already an easy sell for Winnipeg’s psych loving denizens. Add to that rocking cuts from Public Animal, Hawkeyes, Chron Goblin, Devonian Gardens and more, and you got yourself a stoned-blind banger’s wet dream here, son. Pick it up next time you see it at a merch table in a dingy club near you, and crank it up, fuckers! (Pre-Rock Records, prerockrecords.com) Sheldon Birnie