aybe it’s just me, but it seems almost ineveitable when reading a review for a band, any band, that has recorded an instrumental album that some clever reviewer will say that the album sounds like a “soundtrack to an imaginary movie.” It also seems to me that, without fail, the album in question is some derivative of electronic music, be it ambient noise, down tempo beats, or retro-kitschtronica. I must admit that it is a pretty cool concept, even if it is becoming somewhat clichéd terminology; it is inviting and sometimes intriguing to listen to these songs without words and imagine what kinds of scenes they would accompany in a dark movie theater.


If you’re with me on this, then you’ll be thrilled to hear about the newest thing in “soundtracks to imaginary movies.” It isn’t like any “soundtrack to an imaginary movie” you’ve ever heard before, for the following reasons:


1. No one else has ever called it a “soundtrack to an imaginary movie,” and thus, the self perpetuating wheel of hype has never sold it to the masses as such;


2. It has nary an electronic instrument on it, and the music repels “soundtrack to imaginary movie” buzzwords like “ambient,” “soundscape,” and “noir-ish feel;”


3. It rocks too hard to be a soundtrack to any movie I’ve seen since the inception of the term “soundtrack to an imaginary movie.” Which is why, technically, it would have to be a soundtrack to a non-existent movie, but the point is that all other albums that are made up of songs for pretend movies sound a lot like soundtracks to real movies.


The band in question is Karma To Burn, and the album is their latest, Almost Heathen. The thing that sets them apart is that they make instrumental tracks of pretty heavy music, and they keep it instrumental because they want their records to be viewed and listened to as simply music, without words to tell you what the song is about. This is why the album lends itself so readily to the concept of the imaginary soundtrack. Plenty of metal bands before them have thrown the occasional instrumental track onto an album, but Karma To Burn has recorded two albums and a handful of demos worth of material in this vein. They did record one album, their self-titled 1997 release, which had vocals only because their label at the time, Roadrunner Records, required a singer as a condition of their contract even though all their demo material was purely instrumental. It was apparent on listening to the album that the singer had been abruptly plugged in (all of the tracks were recorded long before they even brought him aboard.) The core members of the band let the singer go, gave Roadrunner the middle finger, and went and found a home at semi-indie rock label Spitfire. Their commitment to the stylistic purity of their music extends to the song titles, which are simply numbers based on the order the songs were recorded in. They are not played in sequence on the albums; again, they do this to allow the listener to listen to the song free of pre-conceived notions.


This isn’t exactly as avant-garde a concept as a John Cage symphony or anything, but it’s pretty refreshing to hear a metal band with the ideals of stylistic purity, even if it rapidly becomes clear that the purest aspect of their ideal is to rock you, and rock you hard. If you’re really into putting music into genres, Almost Heathen sounds most like metal of the “desert/stoner rock” variety. It’s not as whimsical as the lighter Queens of the Stone Age songs, it doesn’t have the churning, dark sludge of Sleep or Trouble, and it’s not as trippy as Kyuss tried to be, although all of these bands are pretty good reference points. What it does do is kick your ass thoroughly; Almost Heathen contains throbbing basslines aplenty to liquify your bones, drumming heavy and fluid enough to induce cardiac arrhythmia, and a variety of monolithic guitar work that could make you flex your muscles involuntarily. I say these things because it is very physical music, the kind where you start off nodding your head to it and before you realize are playing air guitar or pounding out drumbeats on the wall of your cubicle. It is heavy music, and can be very dark at times, but it never gets ugly; it’s always enjoyable, at least if you are the kind of person who from time to time wants to set down your latest copy of The Wire, forget about the “importance” of bands and just rock the fuck out, which is exactly the point of Almost Heathen. I think that this is a good concept in general when taken in the proper doses, and the execution on Almost Heathen is flawless.


So, you may or may not be wondering, what kind of imaginary movies do I see while I’m pretending to be a heavy metal drummer while Almost Heathen is playing? I’m not sure really, I don’t yet have a definitive vision, but the one I’m most fond of involves turbo powered dune buggies, sunset in Death Valley, vodka, the smell of sweat, gnarly peppered rattlesnake jerky, terrorists with rocket launchers, and a cataclysmic earthquake. If you had any doubts about the music before...