Artist: Suicide Silence
Label: Century Media
Release: 2009
Runtime: 37:52
Rating: 3.5/5
Suicide Silence are among the younger bands, sitting at the top of the hottest acts in the modern branch of extreme metal. Two years after their studio debut “The Cleansing” (2007), the guys from Riverside (California, USA) continue the saga of their musical craft.
The musical direction of the new album doesn’t offer any special departures from the debut. Especially once you tackle the first two tracks of the new album, Wake Up and Lifted. They’re two furiously noisy documents that send the new album into a 110% gallop. The band stays true to its take on a blend of death grind thrash core, where, besides the excellent, red-hot live production with a massive smear of riffs from both guitars, one of the most interesting trademarks of this particular brand of racket called Suicide Silence is Mitch Lucker’s vocals. The switching between cookie monster (death growl) “gurgling” and raging hardcore screams still coexists phenomenally from verse to verse. Luker is convincingly unbridled, aggressive, and brutal on vocals. In the production, it’s worth singling out the metallic snare sound, which recalls the classic sound Metallica once brought to the table. It sounds superior in the overall sonic picture, shaping the new Suicide Silence sound in the studio.
Suicide Silence are a band that has spent a lot of time on concert stages over the past two years. In that time they’ve gathered a lot of experience and grown up a bit, getting more mature. The guys put together and wrote half of all the tracks on tour, and some of them, such as Wake Up, they’d already been playing live for quite a while, long before the album came out.
After the first two tracks spin out, we’re faced with a few more melodic elements, which both guitars build into the shape of the new songs alongside the merciless riffs. But everything is tuned by the half-step curve of the riffs, which is fanned at points by a technically highly skilled drumming fortress that finds tons of room to spread its wings and show off all its skill and mastery. So Suicide Silence spew out at full tilt, and there’s no feeling that they could ever stop. The tracks Something Invisible, the title track, as well as Suffer make no secret of flirting with the guidelines of grind. At these points you can enjoy the bold interplay among the exploratory drums, with some extremely interesting backdrops of transitional passages and tempo changes, and the rigidly focused yet venomous strikes of half-step riff butchery that forces the ears to bleed, with combined screaming and growling fitting in tastefully.
The bigger experiment the band allows itself is …And Then She Bled, which calms the album down, and the dynamic drops at this point. The leap is so big compared to the first six smashers that it actually feels jarring, and that taste of uncompromising butchery the band serves the listener gets watered down. So that wasn’t an especially smart move by the band. After the less interesting Wasted, Suicide Silence return with Your Creations to the attributes we demand from them, in the language that the first half of this album understands and follows. Interestingly, though, the last two tracks don’t strive for the deadly look of the album’s opening, which you’d otherwise expect, so the album’s finish doesn’t deliver any particular intensity.
“No Time To Bleed” marks a creative point where the band has put out a more developmentally mature successor to the debut. Notably, it boasts more varied compositions than its predecessor, which suggests the band wanted more musical experimentation. That means the album may not sit well with anyone who demands a uncompromising manifestation of noise and aggression on the “first listen”. As such, the new album has fewer weighty arguments of the kind that characterized the debut, which was merely a rational walk in the footsteps of Despised Icon, All Shall Perish, or Carnifex. Because of that, the new album also offers more of its own distinct identity, which is a rightly directed step forward in development.
The feeling, then, is that this album isn’t as aggressive, deadly, and uncompromisingly battering as the debut. On the other hand, it’s precisely that touch more polish in the songwriting, especially in adding a few more guitar melodies in unison, that makes for a different album, one that all fans of the band will still be happy with, as well as fans of the fusion of the extreme metal branches described.
Lineup
Mitch Lucker – vocals
Chris Garza – guitar
Mark Heylum – guitar
Dan Kenny – bass guitar
Alex Lopez – drums
Production
Machine
Tracklist
1. Wake Up
2. Lifted
3. Smoke
4. Something Invisible
5. No Time To Bleed
6. Suffer
7. …And Then She Bled
8. Wasted
9. Your Creations
10. Genocide
11. Disengage
