Review Summary: The most important "DSBM" album since Shining's V - Halmstad
You haven’t felt safe in days. Teetering on the brink of letting yourself do something that you plan on being the last conscious thing you do. You have an appointment with your shrink today. You haven’t uttered a word in hours. You don’t know how to put your internal suffering into words, usually it comes out symbolically: as writing on any surface.
They ask you how you’re doing and you can’t answer. The thoughts are swirling and have been for some time, but nothing can come out. This is the terrible normalcy that I’m In A Coffin manages by setting a thematic in the first moments of each track. The depths of the darkness comes from different places at different times; a marked difference from their album twelve years prior, where a chunky and sweltering bass set the tone on every track. With Waste of Skin, Adorable and Sad-ist have refined their mixing of each individual part of the sound in order to allow for the harrowing journey to have its times of suffocating levels of overwhelming sounds with both vocal parts, the chords, and the crashing of cymbals all coming together in a suicidal cacophony and its moments of dark, brooding meditation as to how the pieces of suicidal ideation come together into a grand scheme for the ending of one’s futile existence when one’s perception of themselves is only understood through the pain and agony.
They call the ambulance and you answer their questions so they can take you to an empty room to be left alone only to answer more questions and be left alone for hours as those you thought were closest to you look on in horror, perceiving something different than the person that was there the last time they saw you. The piano use is certainly effective in a track like “Slave to My Skin,” allowing for a different type of movement to carry the melody that lay behind the madness. You try to have a sense of humor about this situation…sitting in what feels like isolation, you make bad jokes with the doctors who will ask you the same questions as the next few in the next few rooms you get moved to, not unlike the sample that opens the album in “Solipsistic Dry Heaves.”
Two types of buildups: the feeling that left you speechless for days…leading to the belief that suicide was the only way out and the one that lead to nothing but the movement of your body from one room to the next under the watch of various instruments of the medical establishment. Some of the biggest improvements come in Adorable’s drumming, as he utilizes a much wider array of drum patterns that give slight variations on the riffs that carry the melancholic base of each track.
Many of the individual songs, particularly “Dust Spirit,” appropriately lead to nothing. They drop out into the instrumental “Dawn Goes Down Today,” a well-placed meditative moment, as this marks the point at which you won’t see the outside world for several days. And after the drugs wear off, it all comes crashing again in “Suicide Eyes.” Just like the fact that suicide is a permanent solution to a permanent problem, the medicine is just a temporary solution to the same problem.
Despite this observation, listening, and prescribing that were supposed to help you, nothing on the outside is different. You are still a “Life [that] Never Was.” The numbness from the medicine they give you comes and goes, but the agony rings in your ears and the anxiety does not let the distortion of your perceptions go away. The inside of the medical establishment, the six previous tracks, work merely as a long form to this, a summary of everything that has happened. Being put through a mechanical system was merely an addition to the list of reasons for knowing that it is time to give up. The crushing anxiety is still there…“You’re nothing, you’re no one” . . .“Kill me.”
