Band's List Deathcore Suicide Silence No Time to Bleed

Alright.
I'm feeling a little bit like maybe I have glanced over the genre of deathcore too quickly. So to hell with it, I decided to listen to a full deathcore album and review it. Why have I picked Suicide Silence? Well, being a guy who has bought from CM Distro before, I've seen sooooooo many ads showcasing Century Media's newly signed band shoved in my face that their logo has been burned into my retinas. Not only that, but whenever deathcore comes up Suicide Silence and Bring Me The Horizon are mentioned right away, along with a bunch of 13-year olds talking about how TTLY FOOKIN BROOTAL the music is. I have already heard one Suicide Silence song off a Century Media Demo I was sent that was promoting new albums, bands, etc. The song was Wake Up, and.. well...

GENERIC. GENERIC, GENERIC, GENERIC.
I really want to say something witty about how dull the song was, but words just couldn't describe it. But then I said hey, maybe I just heard the wrong song from this band. After all, my first Dimmu Borgir song was Puritania, and I loathed it... but now I like Dimmu's first two albums. So I said to myself, well, it can't be any worse than this, right? The song is called 'Wake Up' for fuck's sake. I know at least 5 other bands that have a song with the same title. So maybe this was just a mosh-pit fodder song, and the real appeal (hehe, it rhymes) of Suicide Silence lies in their other songs.

So, I get a hold of the album. Let's take a look at the track listing...
Wake Up IS THE FIRST FRIGGIN SONG.
Ohhhhh God no. Everyone knows that unless the first song is an introduction, the first song is the 'hooker'; the song to get the audience into the album. If Wake Up is the first song... oh God do I really wanna hear the rest of this?

After Wake Up ends, we get a song called 'Lifted' which opens with a little interlude (maybe this shoulda been the first song, no?) and all I can think is "y'know, this sounds really uninspired to me" and then the song kicks in and before long, you get a few dull riffs with the vocalist shouting his head off in the most tired-out, overused way you can think of. The vocalist goes from a Cradle of Filth scream to a Cannible Corpse growl, (as if we've never heard that sort of combination before) and not that he's a bad singer, he's just an uninteresting vocalist. Then the song moves into the CHUGGING. Oh fantastic. NOW I feel that this band is SUPER unique. I can feel the originality just DRIPPING FROM IT. To make it worse, there are a bunch of terrible guitar sweeps pooped randomly into the song. As the album continues, you're hit with a barrage of drums, (probably the best thing on the album) chugging guitars that really don't do much of anything that's interesting, and cookie-cutter assembly-line extreme metal vocals that I have heard WAAAAAAY too many times before. The odd solo-ey riff is thrown in there JUST BECAUSE, the bass guitar might as well be played by a man with no arms (I can't even hear the damn thing) and the whole album comes off as so standard that by the time I'm at the third song, I'm bored.

And so the album goes on. And on, and on. For close to FORTY MINUTES. The only song that's distinguishable by the end is an instrumental called ...And Then She Bled (nice song name, guys. And Then I Turned Off my CD Player) Even this song is dull. It's better than the other songs, sure, but only because it VARIES from the other songs. It's slower, for one thing, (the only other song that's slow-ish on here is Disengage) and it involves a recording of a woman yelling/talking... she's saying something about witnessing a murder... and it's accompanied with mindless plodding on the guitar. And then it's over... and GUESS WHAT?
A whole shitload of the same stuff that I heard before the instrumental came on. That's the whole album for you. I don't need to go into a song-by-song explanation or even mention any more songs. Yeah, the songs are that interchangeable.

See, the major problem with Suicide Silence (from what I can tell from this album) is they try too hard to be TTLY FOOKIN BROOTAL without substance or anything deeper than mosh-pit music, and all they have to show for it is being boring. There's just nothing anywhere in the music that stands out to me or says "Now that's sorta interesting". This album is just SO unmemorable and SO monotonous and (I just can't put enough emphasis on this one) GENERIC. Another thing is they seem to hide behind a wall of sound that prevents the average listener from distinguishing one part from another. And even if you concentrate on say, the guitars, all you hear is CHUGGA-CHUGGA-CHOO-CHOO riffs and simple, SIMPLE chord progressions. There are a few breakdowns, but even those are uninspired and dull.

I'm sorry, but I don't see Suicide Silence as anything above being some band that's made just for people who stnad around goin' "OH THAT'S SO FUCKING EXTREME THEY'RE SO HEAVYYYYYY!" I have to say, Suicide Silence being like 75% of the modern extreme metal bands out there does NOT make them heavy. Chugging does not make them heavy. Making a half-assed album that sounds like it's fresh off the assembly line doesn't make them heavy. And I can't feel like a band is extreme at all when I'm bored to death when I'm listening to it. Look, I love heavy music, but this is just so run-of-the-mill that it agonizes me to listen to the whole CD. Lastly, I think they're good musicians, but TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE songwriters. I give them 4 points for having a fancy drummer. I don't know about the rest of the deathcore genre, but these guys are worthless.

For one reason or another some bands stir up really strong emotions, both positive and negative. Suicide Silence is one of those bands. They haven't been around very long, but have already attracted a sizeable fan base, and also a sizeable base of detractors.
No Time to Bleed is their second full-length. Suicide Silence plays deathcore, alternating fast and frenzied death metal with slower paced sections and breakdowns. It's a formula that gets crowds worked into a frenzy in a live setting, but on CD can get repetitive.

"Suffer" is a typical song, starting off with rapid-fire intensity and blast beats before slowing down into a mid-tempo groove, and then slowing down even more to a crushing crawl before blasting off again and changing tempos a few more times.

The strongest part of No Time to Bleed is Mitch Lucker's vocals. He uses everything from ominous low-pitched growls to angry screams to high pitched yells.

Suicide Silence is technically sound, but although the songs have numerous tempo changes, they aren't always very distinctive or memorable. There are some interesting moments on this CD, such as "Wasted" and the semi-instrumental "...and Then She Bled," but a bit more originality would propel them even higher

For one thing, Rest in Peace Mitch Lucker. You were a influence to many people and are one of the best vocalists to ever live. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and his fellow band members for having to suffer this tragedy.

Now to the review.

The album No Time to Bleed was released in 2009 by Century Media Records, and lots of people were disappointed by it. My question is, "Why?" I've heard people say that it was nothing like The Cleansing and it was a promise-breaker because Mitch promised to have something better than The Cleansing. I say it was better than The Cleansing. The music and sound was better, the vocals were better, and just the album itself is better. Now don't get me wrong, The Cleansing was a promising record, with it to get them the fans from all over the world. And the songs were very crushing and powerful, as to the songs in No Time to Bleed. But the songs in No Time to Bleed were just more than The Cleansing.

I remember the first song I ever listened to by them, is Genocide. I remember watching the music video for it, and holy hell, it was crazy. I fell in love with them immediately. They just blew me away and changed my perspective about extreme metal. And I'm certainly glad it did, now that I listen to all the other amazing talented bands such as Cradle of Filth, and Disfiguring the Goddess. So Suicide Silence was kind of my breakthrough to this world of deathcore and all other metal.

The album itself, I have to say it sounds like a death metal album. Not a deathcore one. Just because the way they play their songs and how it's structured, there is nothing I see that's deathcore like in this album. Although on this site, it's considered deathcore... But anyways, they sound like a death metal band in my opinion. Now as to song structure, it gets intense. The songs in here are much more complex and structured than the songs in The Cleansing. It doesn't have that annoying repeat snare drum that's in the middle of the part of the song. You can only take so much of it to the point where you just can't listen to it anymore... Not that I'm saying its bad, but they overused it in The Cleansing. And its quite a transition from that to No Time to Bleed where it fits with the song and it's not in every major part of it. The songs also have a change of pace. Like as to Disengage, and Wake Up, they have a slower pace. And as to songs like Genocide and No Time to Bleed, they are crazy fast and crushing and they just make your ears bleed! I just love how they have made the transition from The Cleansing to this type of material, where they sound like a legit, death metal band. The sound of the music as well, is a major change. Where is was a heavily distorted guitars in The Cleansing, to seriously heavy guitars that fit with the rest of band.

I'd have to say, I say Mitch kept his promise as to saying that this album is gonna be better than The Cleansing. Because this album had lots of potential in it, I would say a little more than The Cleansing. But nothing can take away what The Cleansing did for this band. Which is, make it the best band that the world has seen. And as for Mitch Lucker, We Will All Miss You