"Very much a tight knit unit with three equal players, Fire! has been likened to powerful guitar led trios such as Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, but with Johan Berthling's heavy, doom-laden basslines being such a typical identifier, you can't help but think of Black Sabbath's debut album (1970) when it comes to hypnotic impact. The Hands is the trio's sixth album and it once again displays a totally uncompromising and intriguing mix of (mostly) heavy, dark, and intensely burning music whether one decides to call it jazz or rock. The album closes on a quiet and reflective note with the appropriately titled "I Guard Her To Rest. Declaring Silence." And you might say it's easily their best so far. Personnel: Mats Gustafsson - tenor, baritone and bass saxophones, live electronics; Johan Berthling - electric and double bass; Andreas Werliin - drums, percussion and feedback.

"Life gets heavy. It seems to gather increasing weight and density as you progress through it until you either reach a point where you feel able to discard this accumulated mass or you let it drag you down and you spend endless days and nights carting a ballast of woe and regret with you in every move you make. Eventually, that becomes unsustainable and the very structures which keep you alive and moving will collapse under this dark pressure. You become like a deep sea behemoth floating ever downwards under the weight of the clustered barnacles and limpets which have attached themselves to your outer surface and fed upon your life force.

Unless you do something. Make something. Don't let existence turn you into Mek-Quake's next order of "Big Jobs!" even as he's chewing up twisted pieces of sentient machinery in his robotic jaws with you waiting in line. There is something of that desperate desire to communicate, to move on and to validate oneself in whatever world possible, in the brutal yet cathartic pummelling of Fire!'s sixth album. As tools must be found in order to salvage wrecks, so The Hands rip you through the weary dregs and exhausted lows until some form of forward momentum can finally be engaged. You need hands.

Despite my initial misgivings around their debut 2009 release, You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago, and a suspicion that this was a short-lived side project for the three players, Fire! have grown in stature and strength with each album ploughing deeper and heavier into their increasingly ferocious take on drone rock spliced with free jazz. Johan Berthling's bass on The Hands now sounds dredged up from the same overloaded and engorged morass as Al Cisneros's playing in Sleep. He's amply matched by Andreas Werliin's drum work sliding effortlessly from nimble tom patters to bone-crunching troll beats while Mats Gustafsson, whose sax has never sounded more bloodied and bruised than it does here, now has a three-piece unit easily The Thing's equal in sheer heft and force.

Consisting of seven relatively short pieces across 36 minutes, The Hands plays like a succession of scenes or vignettes all attempting to communicate some opaque and unsayable knowledge. The title track opens the album with scrapes and scratches before detonating into a sharp metallic groove over which Gustafsson's sax squeals with such ferocious focus that you can picture the whites of his eyes boring into your skin. Other tracks, such as 'When Her Lips Collapsed' and 'Touches Me With The Tips of Wonder', have Gustafsson playing as a gurgling guttural wail, a blues from a snowy grave, or mournfully smearing himself in solace and sorrow across Berthling and Werliin's solid yet ever-shifting rhythms."-Euan Andrews, The Quietus