Burning Image

Burning Image

Fantasma

Alternative Tentacles

Bakersfield's deathrock originators Burning Image was subject to an Alternative Tentacles "Reissue of Necessity" treatment with the CD collection 1983-1987.  Fantasma, their first new album in more than 20 years, was fuelled by the gloom and doom of life during wartime and global economic meltdown, arguably the best time for dark music to emerge. The record features ten songs birthed in this new world of pain--a return to form from "the band that refused to die."  "They pricked up my ears when I first heard them in '84, toward the tail-end of my involvement with Maximum Rocknroll radio. Hardcore ruled, so more and more of what we got in was pretty generic.... The one time MRR played a demo of 'Final Conflict,' I was floored. I had to hear more, they obliged--not one weak track on the whole tape. I then invited them up to San Francisco to open for Dead Kennedys, the Butthole Surfers, and MIA. They brought their own cobwebs and played their own sound. No one in California was doing quite what they were.  "Then as quickly as they appeared, they were gone. People who chanced on the 7-inch over the years, with its near-Amebix/Peni-caliber artwork, were left wondering, 'Who were these guys?'   "In England they might have fit right in with the Bat Cave scene. It wasn't called Goth quite yet; the British music press had the gall to call it 'positive punk.' What drew me to Burning Image was they had the punk teeth most of the Bat...

Burning Image

1983 - 1987

Alternative Tentacles

***The second in Alternative Tentacles' "punk reissue of necessity" series was unearthed from Bakersfield, California. In the twenty-year gap between Merle Haggard and Korn what do you do in a place like Bakersfield? Find three other mutants with equipment and cook up a stew of punk, goth and hardcore. BURNING IMAGE did just that, releasing an amazing single before dropping off the map. Includes all ten songs from the band's Final Conflict sessions produced by CHAZ RAMIREZ (Adolescents, Social Distortion, Leaving Trains), plus three gems recorded later.