The Burning Hell are re-releasing their third album, Baby, for its ten-year anniversary – and this time on vinyl. Back when Baby first saw daylight, the world was practically a whole different place. In 2009 we were still asking “What the heck is going on?” but with far fewer expletives mixed in. It was a time of relative innocence: Barrack Obama was peddling hope and everyone was still trying to come grips with the phenomenon of sparkly vampires. Given the gross shift in perspective the last decade has brought, we thought it prudent to check in with Mathias Kom, the loquacious lyricist himself, to see where things stood for him at the time of the album’s original release.
In typical Burning Hell fashion, the album delivers a stream-of-consciousness style screed from Kom on that most timeless of subjects: life. Kom digs in to the fleeting moments in between and all their accompany thoughts. There’s such an immediacy and completeness to each song there’s no room left for anything but sincerity. Except for guest vocals from Wax Mannequin. There’s always room for that.
Here’s Mathias in his own words:
“Baby was recorded over the course of two or three cross-country tours over ten years ago,” says Kom. “Our second album, Happy Birthday, had been a rather dark and sombre thing, and I was determined that Baby would be the opposite in every way. So I started writing joyful songs that reflected the real joy I was feeling, spending most of my time playing music for the first time in my life.
Back then, the band was still in its infancy, and people came and went from tour to tour depending on who was around, who had a job, and who had a banjolele or an omnichord they could throw into the mix. It was absolute chaos, but a really beautiful kind of chaos. We were having so much fun – driving around the country, going to exotic places like Corner Brook and Prince George and Regina and Hamilton, eating new foods like cod tongues and 99-cent pizza – that I’m not sure any of us even stopped to think that it might be too much to record an album along the way.
We recorded bits of what eventually became Baby in Vancouver, other bits in rural Nova Scotia at Construction & Destruction’s studio The Quarantine, and final bits at the House of Miracles, then based in London Ontario. Around sixteen people made musical contributions of one kind or another, including a tiny, actual baby named Otis Andrew Mr Bones Magoffin.
This was around the time that The Burning Hell started to be referred to as a “ramshackle collective,” or some less-kind equivalents, depending on who was writing or talking about us. Our performances were carried by enthusiasm and a pure love of playing music together at least as much as by the quality of the songwriting, musicianship, or polish (there was little polish, in any case). That kind of joy is something that I don’t see enough of in live music, and I learned how important it is to me in that era, touring and recording with our ramshackle collective, the cast that came together and drifted apart and cam together again and eventually made Baby.
Now a decade has gone by. Many of the musicians I worked with on Baby are now busy taking care of real babies, or they’ve found jobs, or moved far, far away. The Burning Hell is a trio these days, and despite the six albums we’ve released since Baby, a lot of those songs are still in regular rotation in our sets. I’m not usually fond of nostalgic re-releases, but I’m very fond of Baby, and I’m really excited that it’s coming out on vinyl after all these years.
You can never go home again, they say, but you can always dust off an old baby and show it to your friends. Is that how the saying goes?”
The Burning Hell’s Baby is being re-released via BB Island on November 16th, 2018. If you’re interested in pre-orders the vinyl you can find it right here.