Suicide Silence - The Cleansing

My college years were my first real foray into the genre of metal. I had been surrounded by it during high school; but it had been the plague then, and I’d wanted nothing to do with it. Yet just with as every doe-eyed college student, I felt my horizons widening as I got older, musical tastes included. Suddenly, metal wasn’t so unintelligible or inhuman, and I found myself enthused to dive into this dissonant genre that so many of my peers loved.

It has been more than a few years since metal started making sense to me, and while my tastes again align more towards catchy music, I still have a soft spot for some metal records. Recently I revisited Suicide Silence’s debut, The Cleansing, remembering when its grinding power riffs and growling screams made me clench my jaw in excitement. But while this record still holds up as brutal and energetic, I was more than a little let down by the lack of substance in between its notes.

When I first encountered The Cleansing about five years ago, I was immediately sucked in by the sheer brutality of the instrumentation, which has not faded in the least. Recorded live rather than in separate studio tracks, there is an absolute energy falling off these songs like an avalanche down the side of the mountain. The guitars are loud and blasted with distortion, the drums fast and unrelenting. Suicide Silence avoids lots of repetition in their song structures, using just enough to create themes without bludgeoning the listener endlessly with the same riff, often while switching between time signatures. And while tremolo picking and blast beats abound, songs like “No Pity for a Coward” and “In a Photograph” slip slow, trudging tempos in between the speedy parts, creating swirling moments of chaos that help break up the stream of continuous notes.

Even now, listening to the instrumentation on The Cleansing still leaves me pumped up pretty hard, but if I lean even a little closer for a better look, I find that there really isn’t much to see. As vocalist Mitch Lucker stated in an interview, Suicide Silence “wanted to get our first record out as quick as we could,” and that rush is reflected in the composition. For most of the record, guitarists Mark Heylmun and Chris Garza appear to be playing the same exact parts, piling chugs and fuzz on top of each other, making Mike Bodkins’ bass virtually inaudible, if not completely unnecessary. And while each song obviously has its own flair, the overall submersion in heavy guitar and light speed drumming makes each tune practically indistinguishable from the other.

Suicide Silence certainly nails the death metal aesthetic they are striving for, but fails to provide any variety or surprise for their fans. The guitars are a true wall of sound, blaring through the speakers almost endlessly; Mitch Lucker’s death growls are enlivened and wholly real, but he remains forever at a 10, providing no dynamics whatsoever. Alex Lopez’ drumming is perhaps the most effective part of the instrumentation, as he isn’t afraid to slip back under the rest of the band, pulling up in tunes like “The Disease” to set the stage before he lays into those bombastic blast beats.

This severe lack of variability is just as prevalent in the lyrics on The Cleansing. In line with the demands of their genre, Mitch Lucker overlays the brutal instrumentation of Suicide Silence with lyrics equally as vicious. Violence is his main weapon, and he wields his vehemence like a club with lines like “more of your family’s dead tomorrow” in “Hands of a Killer,” or the heavily spotlighted threat “doctors won’t be able to recognize your fucking face” in “Bludgeoned to Death.” And if violence is Lucker’s sword, then anger is the hand that grips it: Mitch sprays profanity and fury like viper’s venom, unabashedly imploring the subject of “No Pity for a Coward” to “put that gun to your head” and “pull the trigger bitch.”

One of Lucker’s strongest thematic elements is the idea of religion, or more specifically, his own militant atheistic response to religion. Songs like “Unanswered” and “Eyes Sewn Shut” provide direct assaults on the idea of religion and anyone who chooses to follow such beliefs. Lucker even invokes God directly at times, shouting “You let them fall” in “The Fallen” or offering a challenge in “In a Photograph:” “were you just going to sit back / and watch him die?” The Cleansing heavily chronicles Mitch Lucker’s distaste for all things religious, using Suicide Silence’s death metal as a backdrop to champion his lack of faith.

There is no doubt that each of Lucker’s growls is fueled by an inner roiling hate, but the words he rattles off in unintelligible growls lack enough substance to be interesting. He endlessly reworks metal tropes of gore and horrific violence, all without bringing a new flavor to them, or more importantly, providing a new and wholly more realistic perspective on those topics. He derides religion in typical metal fashion, bringing no argument to the table, only loud antagonism. His lyrics regularly trivialize serious human issues like murder or even rape, spinning violent and tasteless scenes into existence for the sake of shock and brutality that apparently are considered comical. The lyrics of The Cleansing revisits again and again the worn out, dark-for-the-sake-of-darkness imagery that pervades the genre of metal, leaving me rather disappointed and more than a bit disgusted.

After spinning this record for the past month, I have to say that The Cleansing has lost much of the luster it once held in my eyes. While I still find Suicide Silence’s thrashing, brutal grooves to be invigorating, I now can’t help but trip on their mistakes. Furthermore, the overall weakness and general insensitivity of the lyrics has left a bad taste in my mouth. And while I have no plans to throw my copy of this record out, that taste has me wishing more than a little that I’d left the CD on the shelf.

Tunes to Check Out:
1) No Pity for a Coward
2) The Disease
3) In a Photograph