Suicide Silence

The criticism we keep hearing lobbed against Suicide Silence,

mostly by people who haven’t even heard the entire thing yet, is
that it’s not a deathcore album, but, rather, a failed attempt at
making mainstream radio rock. This assertion is, frankly, horse
shit. Suicide Silence isn’t a deathcore album… but it’s
DEFINITELY not a failed attempt at making something
mainstream. Eddie Hermida’s singing isn’t soaked in auto-tune,
and is, in fact, often barely on-key; the band frequently utilizes
unusual song structures and foregoes traditional hooks; the only
songs which might qualify as a ballad, “Dying in a Red Room” and
“Conformity,” screw with expectations developed by more
traditional work. The members of Suicide Silence would have to
be deaf to consider this their Subliminal Versesor City of Evil.
Nine tracks in forty-five minutes with no breaks in-between
songs, Suicide Silence is a weird art-metal album, more
comparable to Metallica’s infamous failed experiments, St.
Angerand Lulu, than it is to records where the bands were too-
self-consciously attempting to leap to “the next level,” like
Shadows Fall’s Threads of Life or Atreyu’s Lead Sails and a Paper
Anchor. But unlike St. Anger or Lulu, Suicide Silence succeeds
more often than it fails, and never stumbles into self-parody.
The album pairs the band for the first time with producer Ross
Robinson, who brought his Iow–A game: Suicide Silence was
recorded to analog tape, live in the studio, with no click tracks or
samples, and so the whole thing feels (deliberately) crude and
chaotic. The primary influences are various 90s alt, nu, and death
metal artists — Korn, Cannibal Corpse, Deftones, and Mike Patton
being the most obvious — but on tracks like “Listen” and “Run,”
they all get blended together in sometimes bizarre and always
interesting ways. Suicide Silence have never sounded this
genuinely deranged. Admittedly, the album’s strongest song is its
most unabashedly heavy one: “Hold Me Up, Hold Me Down”
(which probably would have made a great first single if the band
was looking to avoid controversy). But even that song would
probably sound out of place on any other Suicide Silence release.
Robinson also brings out the best in the band members’ individual
performances. Drummer Alex Lopez brings a greater sense of
swing to the table than he ever has in the past, and Mark
Heylmun’s solos on songs like “The Zero” and “Conformity” are
relatively simple but undeniably powerful (think Zim Zum’s solo on
Marilyn Manson’s “Fundamentally Loathsome”). The real standout
here, though, is Hermida, who frequently seems to have recorded
his vocals mid-nervous breakdown; he demonstrates far more
range here than he ever has before, and takes some major risks,
really laying himself bare for the listener. Maybe you dig what he
does and maybe you don’t, but there’s no denying that it’s brave,
and highly preferable to the homogenized, computerized shit that
increasingly passes for metal vocals in the modern era.
“Tell me it’s okay to fail!” Hermida bellows on Suicide Silence‘s
closing track, “Don’t Be Careful You Might Get Hurt.” I don’t think
Suicide Silence have failed here, but I hope they’ve learned that
it’s okay to experiment, maybe stumble a little, and piss off some
fans. I’m not sure that Suicide Silence is a great record, but it’s
certainly a good one, and it took balls to make it. You don’t have
to like Suicide Silence, but you can’t dismiss it, and you must
respect it.