The Classic Metal Album Reviews:
Title: Burn My Eyes
Artist: Machine Head
Label: Roadrunner
Release Date: 1994

Rating: 5 Skulls
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    • Reviewed by Solomon:
    What makes Machine Head's Burn My Eyes so special? Besides being a perfectly slamming record in its own right, BME is a sort of "mutt" record, bridging the gap between two eras. On the one hand, you have 80's cutthroat speed rhythms and discordant riffing and on the other, a gritty, downtuned 90's grunge vibe: Seattle meets Bay Area. Oddly enough, Robb Flynn does sound a little like Kurt Cobain on the soft verses of "I'm Your God Now." Burn My Eyes manages to give metal a modern "facelift" without going off into the "kornfields" (heh heh, such wordplay). Flynn's aggressive but melodic Hetfield-type rantings, traditional guitar solo ripping, speed breaks, and sludgy half-time mosh riffs combine to produce a mean, angry, dirty sounding product. On top of this, Machine Head does a great job of layering complementary song parts that build and release tension, even without a clean/distorted guitar contrast. One of the best examples of this is the slow boil in the opening of "A Thousand Lies" that spills over into a bulldozer-size verse section. Faster tunes like "Block" and "Blood For Blood" are fun, but the defining moments lie in the slower, groovier guitar parts of "Davidian" (after "...shotgun blast"), "Old" (who can forget that opening riff?), "The Rage To Overcome" (after 2nd verse), and "A Nation On Fire" (chorus). Kudos to Burn My Eyes for being both "heavy" and "metal."
    5 out of 5

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