"Maggot Ending", despite its title, might be the most calming, beatific song Sweet has written. Sweet still has a tendency to over-smear the stage blood in his lyrics- at one point, he actually sings "We'll grind your bones to make our bread." But his vocals are warmer than usual, and even allow some outbreaks of multiplart harmony, warm pockets furtively stirred into the cold. "Long Divider" opens with a Casio bump not far away from Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man". Electro bubbles travel like quicksilver up its rigid backbone, and the song locks into a rigor-mortis dance-pop groove reminiscent of Pretty Hate Machine. "Whither Thou Goest, Cretin" opens on a blankly firing piston of a beat, like a copy machine whirring away in the next room. As "Song to Keep Me Still" builds to its climax, the distant sonar ping that starts out as a ghostly presence sprouts fangs and threatens to overwhelm the song. But the best and most rewarding additions to the landscape are the electronic elements: Throughout Burnt Up, the processed sounds that used to drift miles past in the background press their leering faces right up to the window. "Everyone Will Let You Down In the End" lurches in its final minutes into a La Brea tarpit of down-tuned doom guitars. To hear the implied metal break out onto the surface of the Boduf Songs project is a thrilling moment it consummates four album's worth of gathering menace. Electronic locusts chitter, and Sweet sings, repeatedly, "Hallelujah, we laid them with the rest." The Visigoths have raided the temple. The song, "Fiery the Angels Fell", concludes with with a conflagration of guitars, while a twitching wire of a drum track tweezers your nerve endings. Sweet is still whispering, but it's a menacing stage whisper now of the "we have your wife and children" variety. The album title evokes an object hurtling its way to the Earth, and the opening sound follows suit: The first thing you hear is a gargling, wheedling electronic shriek, like a mechanical valkyrie diving for your eyeballs. On Burnt Up on Re-Entry, Sweet's latest as Boduf Songs, it's immediately clear that something different is happening.
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