Stillborn Nursery - Guns Of August
by James

It’s a truly beautiful time to be a fan of heavy music. Two years ago, being a heavy band meant you would be all but ignored by labels and radio. If you screamed all or most of the time, you can kiss your rock star dreams, good-bye. You were doomed to indie label obscurity and, if you’re lucky and worked really hard, you could headline a club tour where you sleep in a van and play for 200 to 300 people a night. Ah, but the times they are a changing. It’s cool to be heavy, again, and bands that used to get ignored are being openly embraced by a listening public sick to death of carbon copy crybabies whining about their mommies. If Stillborn Nursery’s newest release, The Guns Of August, is any indication of where mainstream metal is going, we are in for happy times, indeed.

The album starts off with a vintage rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, which is followed quite aptly by the oddly patriotic My America. I say oddly, because it seems like all you ever hear anymore is bands bitching about how much they hate this country. While My America’s rage is directed at the groups that make life difficult around here, the end feeling is still one of American pride. The song starts off with a kick to the head of double bass that leads into a pulsing, almost hypnotic guitar riff that just skims the edge of being too repetitive. Drew Hauser’s vocals never back down and the focus of his hate is never given safe quarter. I hate to spend so much time on one song, but without a doubt, this is the song you will always remember from this CD. Its chorus is so damn catchy that I had it stuck in my head for months after hearing it for the first time live over a year ago. The rest of the songs on the album do a much better job of representing the electronics side of Stillborn’s music and, for that matter, the diversity of the band as a whole. The samples and turntables blend into the music seamlessly as opposed to sounding like they were just thrown in to be “different”. It was nice to see that Stillborn doesn’t litter their songs with endless amounts of “cool” movie samples like so many other bands that use samples.

Honestly, I could go on forever about how good I think this CD is. Having only had it in my possession for about three days, now, I can’t really nitpick all the intricacies of each song. Suffice it to say that Guns of August is one hell of an impressive first effort. I’ve been following Stillborn Nursery pretty much since they got started and I still wasn’t prepared for how much I liked this. They’ve overcome all of the trappings of their influences and managed to put out an EP that is better than most of the stuff those same influences have released. That in and of itself is something to be very proud of.