Author: Primož Novak
Artist: Suicide Silence
Label: Nuclear Blast
Release: year_month
Length: 44:13
Rating: 2/5
Ten years ago, Suicide Silence were known as the flagship band of the deathcore movement, even though they weren’t among the genre’s pioneers. But in just a few years, things changed a lot. In 2012, vocalist Mitch Lucker, the band’s icon, died in a fatal accident. The band decided to carry on anyway, with Eddie Hermida of All Shall Perish stepping in on vocals. In 2014 they put out You Can’t Stop Me, which solidly carried on the band’s mission and stuck to the established style.
After four albums, the band decided to shake things up, which is hardly anything new for a deathcore band. Deathcore is pretty limited, after all, and it quickly gets dry and predictable. You need upgrades that come out of sensible experimentation. A few examples: Job For A Cowboy got more technical and progressive with every album, Carnifex started flirting with black metal, Whitechapel introduced clean vocals. Long story short, progress is a must if bands want to keep their heads above water. Suicide Silence badly needed a change too, so they turned to producer Ross Robinson, a potential savior.
Even before the band dropped the first single, live clips of the song »Doris« popped up, hinting at something new in the band’s career. But you couldn’t conclude much from those clips, although the clean vocals were already noticeable. Earlier this year Suicide Silence also released the official version of »Doris« and the fans tore it apart. The turning point comes just after the one-minute mark, when Eddie Hermida goes for a higher vocal in the chorus, the one fans started calling »Tee Hee«. That »Tee Hee« turned out to be a harbinger of catastrophe. The song does boast solid, groovy nu-metal riffs and rhythms, but with a chorus this devastating, nothing else matters. In popular music it’s always been crucial for the chorus to do its job and hook the masses, so the rest of the song is simply irrelevant. And as the cherry on top, the sound is muddy and comes across like a slightly better demo. In short, the start is anything but promising.
After a good four minutes of suffering, the music rolls on with »Silence«, dominated by clean vocals, with a few crunchy guitars in that nineties nu-metal style. The band does try to show off its versatility with calmer parts, effects-laden and ambient guitars, but that’s exactly where the rub shows up. The heavy bits aren’t the problem. It’s mostly a recycling job of Korn, Deftones and early Slipknot. Nothing wrong with that, the band never shone with innovative ideas anyway. Suicide Silence started out as a band that simply jumped on the deathcore trend, and now they obviously want to pay tribute to their nineties heroes. Then again, the first attempts at nu-metal groove already showed up on The Black Crown back in 2011. The main problem is that the songs are dragged out with repetitive patterns, needless noisy interludes and forced »atmospheric« sections. A good example is Listen or Hold Me Up, Hold Me Down, where the song’s potential vanishes after three minutes of one clanging »ding-ding« part repeated ad infinitum. And here comes the big question: what exactly was Ross Robinson doing? Did he want to leave his mark, or did he not give a damn about the whole thing? The song structures are anything but good, and it’s not clear what he was trying to achieve with the sound, either.
Within those 44 minutes there are a few bright spots. A pretty bold one is the ballad-tinged Dying in Red Room, where the distortion is pushed to the background and the bass guitar and singable lines stand out. Quite unusual for this band, although you’d expect a bit more melodic sense from Hermida, so the whole thing wouldn’t sound so forced with the clean vocals, where it seems like Eddie is suffering endlessly, just like nu metal singers did before him. Toward the end of the album the band either surprises or shocks again with Conformity. It’s a dreamy song that builds slowly. Its calm mood even brings The Mars Volta to mind, which proves Suicide Silence really did want to widen their spectrum. Guitarist Mark Heylmun leads it nicely into the next part with a solo that’s quite out of character for him. Before, Heylmun played pretty similar arpeggios that sounded rather uninspired, but on Conformity he pulls off a great solo and sounds genuine. The song does drag toward the end, but it can still be considered a standout on this album. The closer, Don’t Be Careful You Might Hurt Yourself, is with its aggression the most deathcore-flavored of the lot, until a calm part with clean vocals shows up and wrecks the song’s dynamics. And again the question: was that the producer’s idea or the band’s?
Fighting your way through 9 songs can be a real ordeal. There are simply too many needless extensions. If the album were 10 minutes shorter, it would undoubtedly be more bearable. The album does have bright spots, but with the opening »Tee Hee« chorus, recycled watered-down ideas and needlessly stretched-out arrangements, those bright spots are invisible. No wonder the album has been dubbed the “St. Anger” of deathcore.
But there’s still hope! In 1996 the legendary Ross Robinson produced Sepultura’s Roots, which broke the band’s run of phenomenal albums. Critics were appalled by it for many years, but soon enough the audience got used to it. 20 years after its release, brothers Max and Iggor Cavalera went on tour and played the whole album, and the halls were pretty well packed. So maybe in 20 years Suicide Silence’s current album will be legendary.
Lineup
Eddie Hermida – vocals
Chris Garza – guitar
Mark Heylmun – guitar
Alex Lopez – drums
Dan Kenny – bass
Production
Ross Robinson, Joe Barresi (mix)
Track list
01. Doris
02. Silence
03. Listen
04. Dying In A Red Room
05. Hold Me Up, Hold Me Down
06. Run
07. The Zero
08. Conformity
09. Don’t Be Careful, You Might Hurt Yourself
