Titan

Toronto, ON-based metal/hardcore monsters Titan, after releasing a couple EPs over the past several years, have finally released their first full-length record, in the form of Burn. Titan have just embarked upon an ambitions European tour to support the record, which will be released by React with Protest overseas, though the domestic release will be on Titan's label, Hypaethral. While Titan have for years busied themselves creating the sounds of the apocalypse, with Burn they have settled on a more specified and refined end: fire. It is as if Gozer the Gozerian asked them to conjure the form of their destruction and when they cleared their minds all they could see were flames. As well as their longest and most comprehensive composition, Burn is also their most precise. The guitar work is nimble and flexible ― even on the broader strokes, the fattest riffs, the leads recall the bright heat of a samurai's blade. What smoulders at the core of Burn, though, is destruction with a very specific motive: this is fire that wants to purify, heat that wants to cauterize. There is a deeply generative, productive energy that informs this album, and as much as Titan are bent on setting the world aflame, I can't help but feel it's because they want to see what flowers dare grow in the ashes.