Review Summary: Average songs mixed in with excellence
THE SONGS
The first five songs of this album are some of my favorite songs in the entire electro-industrial genre. But there are also a bunch of songs that aren’t.
The coolest thing about these first songs is that Johan Van Roy has apparently either used an old – ancient, really – classical technique, or he and his peers have re-invented it independently, consciously or unconsciously. Called “development” in the jargon, it consists of creating or borrowing a very short melody – a “motive” of at least two notes – and then creating entire pieces of music based on it.
I’ll just go through the songs to illustrate what I mean. (I might be completely full of *** here, but I don’t think so).
The album starts with foreboding drone-like waves, and at 0:28 a high-pitched motive enters. Here it’s a dancing, deranged-circus motive, but it appears in different guises in at least the following four songs. For example, in the next song, “Cut-Bleed-Eviscerate,” the motive enters at 1:27. But now it consists of only the middle part of the dancing-motive in the first track: It’s just two different pitches with repetitions; bouncing twice on one note, rising to the top note, then falling back to the first. Simplicity. But that simple “dropping” from one note to the next explains the elements of many pieces of music created in Europe over centuries, pioneered in the days of Vivaldi and Bach, then used for example throughout Haydn’s quartets, culminating perhaps in Mahler’s ninth Symphony (opening movement), where that simple two-note motive is “developed” over the course of thirty minutes of drama that will, I assure you, absolutely bore you to ***ing tears if you’re not into classical music.
Anyway, the opening of the next song, “Blasphemy,” is constructed largely out of the motive, and it appears in yet another incarnation in the following song, the title track, where it comes in with the vocals at 0:44.
The series is topped off with “Monster;” in a perfect world this would’ve ended a perfect EP. On Monster the motive is developed WITHIN THE SAME SONG. It enters at 0:58, in perhaps its simplest form, top-to-bottom and repeated once, the form not significantly different than Mahler’s use of it I cited above. After a slow ominous middle-section in which the baseline ceases, the motive re-enters at 2:57 in a developed form, accompanied by the re-entered baseline in a recapitulation of incredible power.
Finally, I note yet another pattern this music shares with its classical ancestors: The willingness to share and develop other composer’s motives. This is obviously evident in the effusive re-mix culture that Suicide Commando inhabits. Historically, a specific motive can be traced starting with Bach; Beethoven re-used that same motive to develop three of his string quartets a few generations later, and it was re-used again by Wagner another few generations later. This pattern seems to have been repeated in the electro-industrial community: The motive I’ve described above appeared in the chorus of Wumpscut’s song “Wreath of Barbs,” was used a little later by Suicide Commando throughout “When Evil Speaks” as described above, and was lately used on Acylum’s song “Venom” where it appears at 1:25 in simple form and is then developed masterfully over the course of thirty seconds or so.
THE ALBUM
One of the reasons Sputnikmusic is about the coolest music site on the web is because of its ranking system. Ranker.com might give us a feel for how the masses rank Judas Priest relative to other bands, but I doubt there’s many sites that let us compare Priest’s albums to each other.
Even though the Sputnik format is easy, I’m often presented with a conundrum that other reviewers on this site may have experienced when reviewing a band: Is a given album “excellent” in Sputnik-speak? Or is it a handful of mediocre “good” to “poor” songs that were recorded with a handful of “outstanding” songs?
“When Evil Speaks” contains not only some of the best songs created by Johan Van Roy but, in my opinion, some of the best industrial songs ever created in the history of the genre. But I say that only about the first five tracks; the rest range only from “average” to “good.”
I first bumped into the ranking problem on this site while ranking Slayer’s “South of Heaven.” Every metal fan knows that the album contains two of the best metal songs ever written. Songs so important to Slayer’s catalogue that, at least according to a Wikipedia editor, they were “near constant fixtures in the band’s set list.”
I first heard these songs the year South of Heaven was released, and I revisit the album only rarely these days. But when I do, I never listen to tracks 4, 8, and 9. Also, I never listen the studio version of Mandatory Suicide (the studio recording wasn't able to capture the sheer ferocity of that music when it’s played live, which spoiled me. I usually go to a live version of it). Track four is a jazzy little number that, along with their cover of an old Priest song, seems out of place. And track 8 is just kind of boring. Track 6 is excellent for the first minute, and “Spill the Blood” has an excellent ending, but it’s a pretty slow slog up until the last minute.
By song count, then, South of Heaven for me is really just five-and-a-half songs out-of-ten, or a 55 % album, at most. This differs greatly from it’s surrounding albums, which are both 100% albums, with “Blood” winning in song quality over “Abyss.” Amazingly, Sputnik users as a whole felt similarly, with the following rankings:
-- Reign in Blood: 4.4
-- South of Heaven: 4.1
-- Seasons in the Abyss: 4.2
By the numbers, I think South of Heaven would technically be even lower than the other two, more like a 3.5, but the quality of the few classic songs helps bring up the final rank.
Suicide Commando’s “When Evil Speaks” is a kind of “South of Heaven” album for me. The first third of the album contains indispensable songs; songs I connect with as strongly as any of the classics produced by NIN, KMFDM, Ministry, or Skinny Puppy during the Dwayne Goettel days. But tracks 6 -12 of “When Evil Speaks” are “average” or “good” in Sputnik-speak, technically giving the album a “great” rating.
But *** that – I gave it a 4.0. Some of the songs are too good for anything less.
