Fire Engines - Chrome Dawns (2024)

For a band that was only really around for about 18 months, Fire Engines left a lasting impression. Formed in 1979 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and broken up before the end of 1981, they offered a more caustic take on the energetic post-punk that their peers Orange Juice and Josef K were taking to more introspective, moody places. Fire Engines were confrontational, embracing the noise, blurt, and also the inept approach to funk- and dance-oriented music that was happening around the same time in New York's no wave scene. Chrome Dawns is one of several compilations that has surfaced over the years collecting segments of Fire Engines' output from their short-lived initial run. In addition to the inclusion of material from their singles and their sole 1981 mini-album, Lubricate Your Living Room, Chrome Dawns includes two different Peel Sessions sets recorded for the BBC, also in 1981. "Get Up and Use Me" (the band's closest thing to a hit, with some favorable press in U.K. music magazines) is cut from the same cloth as Buy-era Contortions, with vocalist/guitarist David Henderson screaming and writhing his way through the track of abrupt stops and constipated grooves. Fire Engines exhibit the same warped sense of pop as the Raincoats or Kleenex on tracks like "Sympathetic Anaesthetic," and there are undercurrents of Gang of Four-esque punk disco throughout the compilation. "Big Gold Dream" in particular has an anarchistic funkiness to it, with drummer Russell Burn's cymbal-avoidant percussion leading the song's sharp rhythms and backing vocals, bright organs, and way more complex production, setting it apart from the band's far more raw earlier work. Their cover of Heaven 17's "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang," from one of the Peel Sessions included here, has a similar kind of disjointed and punked-up take on music made for '80s nightclubs. It's great to have more or less all of Fire Engines' studio output gathered in one place, and Chrome Dawns illuminates just how quickly the group changed during their brief existence. By the end of the relatively short collection, one can't help but wonder how the band would have progressed if they'd kept going until 1982 or beyond.

Review by Fred Thomas