Review Summary: Powerful and, uh, violent.
Stalingrad’s self-titled debut is a straightforward, angry performance captured and subsequently charmed with lo-fi recording techniques. As the most recent musical undertaking by Jacob Scheppler of Single Soul, his first powerviolence release is also the most extreme style he has attempted thus far – quite the departure from his earlier, folk/bedroom pop project. Clocking in at just over ten minutes of high-tempo chaos,
Stalingrad seems to fly by, but not without leaving its mark. Brevity is a common genre staple, but not just in regards to overall album length, assuming the extremity, and redundancy, of the five-second-fury ‘Industry’ are to be considered. Regardless, this album is chock full of blistering, bite-sized throat punchers, with each one carrying something unique. That’s one area where
Stalingrad excels - there's more variety than one might expect.
This album also relies mostly on tension and release, in a peaks and troughs, wavy kind of format. Needless to say this could get predictable and therefore boring; however Stalingrad incorporates this idea not only in individual tracks, but throughout the album which offsets this issue to an extent. Here and there we have tracks like ‘Rest’, composed of dissonant ambient sounds and serving, as its title suggests, as a short respite from the tracks of fury that it’s sandwiched between. We also have the tapering off in the form of closer ‘Misery’. As the longest track on the album, it features a lot of sustained, distorted notes and sparse drumming, trudging along and winding the album down. It can get a little tiresome, but it's placement at the conclusion of the album makes it a solid closer nonetheless. On the opposite side of the spectrum we have tracks like ‘Sedated’, which, with underlying growling and rapid fire yelling, sounds nothing like what it implies. There’s also ‘Untitled’, featuring some far-away sounding shouting, courtesy of guest vocalist Brendan Nixon of Sensory Deprivation. If there's one paradoxical observation to be made about
Stalingrad, it's the simultaneous strength and weakness of purposely poor production. As aforementioned, the vocals can tend to sound far-away, and in general the dynamic balance of each component is generally out of sync, with varying levels of overpowering occurring.
For all its problems,
Stalingrad is undeniably interesting, and manages to maintain its stranglehold on the listeners senses. At the end of the day, If you dive head-first into a powerviolence album expecting to find anything other than full-throttle instrumental anger, forcefully hazy production, and belligerent vocals spewed over the top, then you're not really after a powerviolence album after all.
