Artist: Suicide Silence
Title: No Time to Bleed
Type: Album
Label: Century Media
US Deathcore band Suicide Silence were a strange supporting act to Polish Black Metallers Behemoth and Devilish Impressions on a European tour last year. To their credit, through their power and magnitude, they managed to get their point across. The opening track of “No Time to Bleed”, “Wake Up” reinforces this view. It comes at the listener from all angles. Its heaviness is undiluted, the dual screeched and growled vocals are in keeping with the clear Death Metal overtones, and, something which I hadn’t remembered from their live shows, the music descends naturally into Doom territory. “Wake Up” is an easy track to get involved with, and I found myself living and breathing its twists and turns. It’s an excellent track.
“Lifted” suggests that this is a band with good ideas. The fusion of Death and Black Metal vocals is there again, there’s an eerie undercurrent and a Doom section in amongst some imaginative modern style Death Metal. “Smoke” starts with a guitar assault, accompanied by the sound of either someone screaming or metal on metal. This is the prelude to another round of Death Metal chaos. I started to realise that the beat is that of a heavy production line. It’s like a machine running. Suicide Silence don’t follow rules, but I came to realise by about the fifth track, “No Time to Bleed”, that they are very mechanical in their delivery. It’s very heavy, and the style of the vocals serves to add a different form of venom. “Suffer” is almost heaviness for its own sake but I sensed that the band had dropped into a familiar pattern. The intensity hadn’t dropped but the album hadn’t developed much since the third track “Smoke”. “ … And Then She Bled” slows it down a bit. The basic rhythm’s the same. This track has the feel of slaves being put through hard labour on a galley ship. “Wanted” is an oddity. It’s a mixture of spoken samples, and conjures up nightmarish and creepy images of distortion and horror. I wasn’t entirely convinced by it, and it signalled the entry into three fairly lame last three tracks. Each of the last three tracks could be described as crushing, and there are some meaty guitar lines, but in spite of the slowed down “Genocide”, the screaming is aimless, the rhythms are dark but anonymous. These last three tracks failed to go beyond simply being heavy and sustain the interest.
The problem I had when seeing Suicide Silence live was after being initially impressed, I found myself losing interest and sloping off to the bar for alternative entertainment. This album has the same effect. After an excellent start, it just doesn’t step up a gear. In fact it just loses its focus. There are some great moments on “No Time to Bleed” and the band’s crushing intensity is a plus factor, but ultimately I thought that the level of imagination and quality was variable.
http://www.myspace.com/suicidesilence
http://www.centurymedia.com
Andrew Doherty
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