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Music

The Burning Hell

THE BURNING HELL with TONY DEKKER and the PINING at the Tranzac (292 Brunswick), Friday (July 29). $10-$12. RT, SS. See listing


The Burning Hell’s last few weeks have been full of highs and lows, humour and sorrow… like something straight out of a Burning Hell song.

On the very last day of their 67-date European tour, disaster struck the Newfoundland-based band. In the span of 24 hours, they were robbed twice.

“We had such a good tour that we got complacent,” says ukulele-playing bandleader Mathias Kom over the phone from Edmonton. “I forgot the maxim that you can never have a perfect tour. Something will always go wrong.”

In the van robbery in Ludz, Poland, the thief didn’t get their instruments but did take all the money they’d made on tour. The band then rushed to Berlin to play their final show, and afterwards realized their clarinet had been stolen off the stage.

With help from the club’s DJ, they managed to find the girl who stole it at a smoky jazz bar across town and recover it using not quite peaceful means.

“That’s when our clarinetist, Ariel [Sharratt], earned her nickname,” recounts Kom. “Knuckles.”

When Kom returned from Europe, he discovered that the band had made back all the lost money through donations, an estimated 75 per cent of which came from other Canadian musicians.

“It was a roller coaster of a day,” he says. “We went from heartbreak to playing a great show to more heartbreak to adventure to something truly heartwarming. It was simultaneously the best and worst day ever.”

The situation sounds ripped out of the Burning Hell’s latest album, Flux Capacitor (weewerk). Kom’s first overtly autobiographical work, it uses clever wordplay, 80s pop culture references and humour to mask a dark core. Despite merry horn-filled arrangements, the wry, bittersweet, often laugh-out-loud funny lyrics obsess over mortality, heartbreak and dashed expectations. That hasn’t stopped some from mis-categorizing the band as a novelty act.

“I think a lot of people want to keep humour in just one part of their lives,” muses Kom. “For me, it’s just one aspect in the spectrum of emotional responses. You don’t have to be deadly serious in your music to convey a serious message.”

music@nowtoronto.com

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