Towers Open Fire

Never heard of them before, but I am a fan after the first track. The sound ranges from mid-tempo punk to melodic metal (really that sound only comes out in the guitar harmonies and leads) and then breaks down into 1990s heartfelt hardcore, like a crusty CURRENT perhaps. My only complaint is the thin, oddly distorted guitar sound, but that is minor, and three tracks in, I hardly notice it anymore. Brillaintly written songs, but never pretentious, with the two guitars are constantly trading melodies and even the dual vocals rarely seeming like overkill. WITCH HUNT comes to mind, in the way the songs flow, although this is certainly more metallic....but regardless of the comparison Towers Open Fire have just made a killer disc. (-Robert) - Slug and Lettuce issue 85

This six-piece band from New Jersey has quite a unique sound. I actually like it alot, but I'm not sure what genre this fits in to.The band calls it "hotsoup hardcore", but that doesn't make any sense to me. They play hardcore with way tuned down guitars and heavily static distortion, fast punk parts, and slow groove like breakdowns. Not hardcore in the traditional sense, but defininetly hardcore in the heavy as hell sense. What I like most about this cd is the riffs and melodies that are played. They don't really sound like any other band I have heard. They're really dark and well written and pieced together in songs, but after hearing this only once, the songs were stuck in my head. The lyrics are great and the vocals are quite fitting for the music, and the band is tight and plays well. I really don't know what to call this, maybe disjointed hardcore? Whatever it is, I really like it. (DJ) - HeartAttack issue 48

TRENTON - Reckless is the best way to describe the city's musical radicals in Towers Open Fire.
A bit loony, insane and totally barbaric in its hardcore form, there’s many ways to decipher the weird-and-wild styles of the area’s most rambunctious band.
Towers Open Fire is Eing aggro to the 10th degree.
Here’s why:
Fire-breathing hardcore chums James Miner and Rus Cullen spit inaudible ostentatious rants, while do-si-doing to the band’s signature compound of thrash, grind and power metal.
Knocking down fans who look too close is typical, but not intentional, and crackling soundboard fuses is the sometimes byproduct of its rock ‘n roll fun.
Spearing rhythm guitarist John O’Neal prefers playing live in his bare feet – even when shredding the dusty, dark corners of Joe’s Mill Hill Saloon’s basement, where shards of glass share space with cobwebs.
Mike Giancarli, a virtuoso on lead guitar, propels progressive shreds at a finger-splitting pace.
Bass player Kat Bohn, while existing in a scene with few female idols, just wouldn’t stop playing a recent Mill Hill set as blood poured from her forehead after a brutal collision with Giancarli’s guitar. And, propelled by the band’s total attempt at audio annihilation, drummer Greg Ribsam’s skins bleed the band’s call of the wild with a kick-fast attack of open warfare.
Savage songstyles and an anti-establishment, DIY spirit, fuel Towers Open Fire.
This is its story.
The legend of a band of misfits, so obscure to the rest of the scene it plays in, it’s hard to look away.
“{What’s our roll in Trenton? I’m not sure,” Cullen pondered outside the 449 Room before a recent benefit show at the Trenton club. “The bills here get real mixed up and it works. And we’re such a mix.
“We all just come from so many different backgrounds musically, both in the stuff we play and the music we listen to,” he said.
“There are a lot of elements of punk and metal, and to some extent soul. There are so many different elements that together it just makes this thing that works. I’m not sure where we fit in, at least in Trenton.”
Cullen and Miner have known each other for a decade – while jumping in and out of punk and thrash acts over the years.
Thrash metal was also the habit of Giancarli and Bohn, who are neighbors and have known each other forever.
The pair knew Ribsam from past projects and started jamming for a while when the double-fisting singing came close to completing the band in the spring of 2004.
With a name lifted from a William Burroughs “word salad” Towers added John O’Neal’s guitar firepower just as the group recorded its 2005 full length, self-produced, debut.
In it, listeners unearthed the groove hidden between the rage and certain funkiness to the instrumentation.
But even the gang understands why its thought as the scene’s premiere hardcore outfit.
The abrasives in the screams, crust-punk elements in the words, coupled by the slaying atmosphere of the arrangements, had people comparing the music to thinking hardcore crews in Band and Kid Dynamite.
But live its not quite as pump-your-fist as Band and certainly Towers Open Fire’s fiery musical brawn is way more awe-inspiring in its complications.
“The metal thing you can’t blame anyone for referring to that kind of music,” Cullen said.
“The riffs are definitely there. The metal influences are definitely there. The riffs, the solos and stuff like that is undeniable metal influence,” he said. “But the images that come to mind when you say a ‘metal band’ is not what we’re going for.”
It’s not the long-haired, freaky, beer chugging most expect from a heavy-metal outfit.
That’s why the new songs, with O’Neal totaling its articulation in a new wave of experimentations, will seek non-metal comparisons in its future.
A lot of the songs on their first record, Cullen said, are too simplistic for the band’s taste now and come our of a more straight-ahead punk attitude.
The songs aren’t these huge epics they’d like.
And since the last record, Towers’ been focused more on longer, technical, expressions with a more triumphant climb in the sound.
“I like a lot of classical influence,” Giancarli said.
“I like . . .layers in music. Melodies going on at the same time, that’s not necessarily nonsense. Not like [grindcore] necessarily, but just melodic layers,” he said. “Right now the songs we’re writing are more evolving.”
Until its new adventures in recording, Towers Open Fire might just have to hold onto its heavy-metal leadership on its jarring musical pounding alone.
But there’s a reason to stop labeling too.
It’s just that no other local band has tackled hardcore affects with such a styled attack.
Towers Open Fire are in-your-face and total non-stop action.
We’ll just have to leave it that.

-Scott Frost - The Trentonian