Neighbours Burning Neighbours - Burning Neighbours (2024)

Rotterdam noiseniks Neighbours Burning Neighbours release a scorching debut, a blueprint for a different kind of guitar rock?

Life is full of twists and turns. The chiming alarm raised by the guitars of Trans Youth, single and opener on the debut of Rotterdam’s Neighbours Burning Neighbours heralds one. After a number of years’ gestation and some brilliant gigs the band release this glorious record, and amicably decide to go their separate ways. All good things pass. Vale.

Let’s judge Burning Neighbours on its considerable merits. The opening two tracks are just fantastic; single Trans Youth is a strident manifesto that brooks no nonsense; but soon the tough side of its nature is countered by a beautiful, mournful guitar line that guides the song to its end. This is the first instance of a pattern that runs through the record, a sort of duality created in sound. This duality suggests other things, messages that are hinted at through song structures or just how a guitar thrashes out a chord.

The sense of “heave-ho” generated by the follow-up track Familiar Place is particularly good in this respect; the beat starts to stray into on-the-one territory at one point and the laconic call-and-answer vocals build up only to break off into a kind of moody silence. (And – while we are here – what a line “Animals don’t need small talk” is. Could anything be more caustic in this world?) Very soon things build again, in a slightly more muscular manner and suddenly we are following another storyline – one that ends in a screaming match and eventually some form of communion around the phrase, “it’s over”. By gum, it sounds good. It’s a terrific cut.

The record has a quiet side to it, though some form of sonic pyrotechnics are never really far away with Neighbours Burning Neighbours. Cotton Brain manages to be lethargic and menacing all at once. Maybe it’s the way singers Alicia Breton Ferrer and Daanie van den IJssel sing the song’s title. Eventually the guitars growl, the bass picks up its familiar rumble, the skins are thumped and matters come to a boil. Always Winning is a plaintive tune with a sweet enough guitar line and soft, sometimes harmonious vocal lines, but there is always the suspicion that, at some point, all hell will break loose.

Then there is Friends, a key track, which has a very messy, old school post punk feel to it; very reminiscent of Girls at Our Best initially, a bit Au Pairs, too. The track has a lovely rushing chorus that almost trips over itself – the vocals interweave almost carelessly as if two people are laughing along to something. (Oh yeah, talking of duality, that “contrast thing” again – where the hell did that organ appear from?) After the organ interlude, the mood switches and becomes more reflective. They’re so mauve…

They are a band adept at creating mood pictures through their lyrics. What they convey – whether physical, mental or emotional – isn’t always fully discernible, but they establish another of this record’s core qualities; its apartness. “Shave your head, hold my hand, always winning” is a particularly effective line on Winning: we don’t know what went on, but the line sticks in your head. Neil Young is another example, a track that balances its message between simple, brusque slabs of noise and delicate, sometimes polyphonic vocals that dip and sway like a lace curtain caught by a passing breeze. Again, we can’t quite work out what Smokey’s done to warrant the line “killing me”, but there are references to “doing the dishes”. Even when the tempo and volume picks up there is a strong feeling of remove – and a lovely guitar line or two that, yes, stick in your head.

What else? Well, Catharsis does exactly what its title instructs it to and Hesitate, an older number, benefits from its multiple live airings to become something much more capable of biting a chunk out of your psyche. The whoops from earlier versions are replaced by lung-bursting screams and additional guitar lines that combine to sound like a train kicking out sparks as it tries to brake. CMU-1 is a fogbound interlude that sets up the plaintive Cheer Me Up – a track that develops into a fabulously louche and capricious slacker anthem. Vocals waft in and out of the guitars’ slightly dissonant blurts and thrashes. Druggy, waspish, a track behoven only to itself. Get Back Up takes the previous track’s laconic mood and, warning us that “no one is waiting, get back up” carries on until the pressure built up by the swell of guitars suddenly stops. Silence.

After a good few listens I came to realise I’d been down this road before. Burning Neighbours reminds me of an old record from almost exactly twenty years ago, another debut as it happens, Lansing-Dreiden’s fantastically gnomic The Incomplete Triangle. Both records hint at something essential, something different, music made by acts committed to looking at the world anew through their craft. Both have a sense of secrecy, of sworn pacts, known only to initiates, of a battle, soundtracked by swelling melodies and harmonies, and vicious, gnomic, sonic counterpoints. (Can’t have too much of a good time, after all.) Back in 2004, I couldn’t get enough of The Incomplete Triangle and right now I can’t get enough of Burning Neighbours. And at least, we had that then, and now we have this, to hang on to.