Review Summary: "Rip My Throat, Drink My Blood, Strangle Me, Drown Me, Give Me Vain And Give Me Pain, Knives Running Through Me, Oh, Master Of Wounds - Cut Me, Chase Me, Waste Me". Does this only sound a tad pretentious to me?
Suicidal Black Metal. That's the genre Silencer chose to serve with their first and only recording,
Death - Pierce Me. What this album is all about becomes obvious with a quick glimpse at the artwork and the lyrics. Self - torturing, self - mutilation. Utter loss of hope, utter loss of humanity. Hate for everyone and everything, hate for one's self, for one's body, fot one's own existence. Worship of pain, worship of death in its most painful and extreme form. There can be two ways to see this:
a. Pure pretentiousness. Something extremely grim and shocking. Something just like Nattramn's infamous picture with the pig legs tied to his arms. Something as ugly as it gets. Let's create something shocking, for shock's sake. And let's garnish it with some obscure and ominous rumours - he actually cut his hands off to achieve his over the top performance, he got institutionalised, etc etc etc.
b. This is actually real. This is honest. This is a dive in the darkest depths of a human soul. It's an expression of the vilest, the most hideous thoughts and feelings a human brain could ever have.
In the first case, once you get over the initial shock, you can just look at it from a safe distance, as a monstrous hoax that had you in the beginning, but, after all, it's something you will never be able to identify yourself with - because it's fake. Should case (b) be ture, it's just something too appalling to be interested in. Art in its greatest form is, in its majority, an expression of one's dark, negative, depressive and pessimist feelings, but this is just too much. This dive into a -possibly- criminally insane mind is just something that can only make you turn away instead of partaking in it.
And, somehow, Silencer's album manages to sound like a combination of the two. At least to my ears. It surely is quite original. Not the typical 'grim and frostbitten' black metal, not the usual, plastic 'keyboards, keyboards, keyboards' atmospheric black metal. The guitarwork succeeds in creating a really dark and terrifying atmosphere, which is what the music is aimed at. The songs are quite lengthy, but their structure manages to keep them from sounding too drawn out. Here you will find a fair share of melodic passages, subtle use of keyobards, as well the fast parts and blastbeats you are expecting from a black metal album. I must admit that the music serves its purpose really well and one could say it's quite innovative.
And then we come to Nattramn's vocals. The record's most infamous and (supposedly) extreme aspect. It's almost unbelievable what has been rumoured on why and how he achieved that squealing. Because that's what it is, Nattramn's allegedly tortured, suicidal vocals. Squaling. And, supposing this was actually the way he needed to express himself, it's just too ugly and, frankly, annoying to be interesting.
The question is: is the result they -succesfully- achieve and the cause Silencer serve something the listener is willing to share with them? Appart from its shock value, does it have anything really worthwile to offer? In my humble opinion, the answer is no. As succesful that sick and horrific feeling might be, it is also repellent and utterly pretentious.
This record is just like Nattramn in his infamous photograph. Shocking, disturbed, imaginative and original - but also fat, ugly, over the top, annoying and -hopefully- fake.
