Black Lung — The Soul Consumer
Black Lung's latest, "The Soul Consumer" is packaged in an attention grabbing digipak featuring photos of mauled, bloody and skinless carcasses of unidentifiable origin. Opening the case, we find main member David Thrussell's note, in which he relates having first tasted human flesh several years since, and how his preoccupation with creating an album while subsisting on solely human flesh resulted in this album. Needless to say, I was disgusted and intrigued by this, truthful or not, and conscious of the fact that Thrussell had blatantly crossed a boundary few dare to tread near.
"Symphony for the Damned" opens the album, beginning with a tense, cinematic orchestral theme easily compared to the music that would accompany some horrific moment of realization in a B horror film. As the tension rises, spaced out science fiction synth sweeps drag the track further into emptiness. The first real song is "The First Tender Cut". With manic enthusiasm, Black Lung rips into some distorted drum set playing, raucous fuzzed out rock bass and ungodly, wispy effects that prove to be stylistically representative of the album as a whole. The sounds are heavy with electronic processing, but tastefully hint at acoustic origins. The distinct taste of blood is in the back of my throat, and I've just experienced a marvellous one-two punch of an opening gesture.
As the album goes on, the driving rhythms continue, accompanied by a wet swirl of delayed, distorted or phased synths and guitars playing unsympathetic, confrontational ostinati. Dominated by basslines, most tracks only hint at melody through such devices as cut up samples of bells and sharp interjections of shrieking higher octave synthesizers. The tense, snarling abandon of "Curdled On Waxen Floors" is a highlight. Over a seething bed of string dissonance, a punchy, synthetic and detuned brass chord patch blares a car horn rhythm. Atonal synthetic squelches scream out of the speakers, hopelessly demolished by frequency modulation. The cinematic tone of the album opener also returns with "Moontide and Muzak", this time settling into a spy movie chase scene groove, with occasional nods to horror in the form of organ arpeggi.
Predictability does set in as Thrussell's formula becomes evident. Before you know it, you're chilling out or doing your homework with cannibal music playing in the background. Upon realizing this, one might feel a little guilty, but really it's only natural, as "The Soul Consumer" is, at its core, a thematic jam record, a collection of enthusiastic, tasty grooves and riffs colored by a premise.
The album closer is the suitably creepy "The Ebullient Memorial", a sluggish, circular and beatless necrofied ghost waltz for scratchy synth pad and distorted bells that extends for 10 minutes. It never becomes out and out tedious, but the sounds are not deep enough to warrant such a length, and no development, layering or modulation takes place within the track. Even a couple whispers would have added new dimensions of consciousness to the song.
A lack of inventive structures and straight-ahead rock beats (which appear in nearly every track) are this album's notable weaknesses. In the less inspired tracks, Thrussell's evocative loops are stifled by the clumsy metric chunks of 4 and 8 in which they are arranged. On an album such as this, which is clearly intended to catapult the listener head first into a unique flavor of delirium, reminders of tired musical traditions are not necessary, and serve only to take the listener out of the music. The pounding electronic percussion of "Mr. Love Teeth" and "Sauteed Outer Members" create the albums most intense moments, as they aid the repetitive style of composition in inducing a more hypnotic effect. I also find myself gravitating to the evocatively freeform atmospheric sounds between songs, which knit the album together quite well.
In conclusion, David Thrussell successfully establishes a sense of danger and dread only to let it ebb with the repetition of his formula. "The Soul Consumer" is full of interesting sounds and would make a great halloween album, yet it's clearly overlong as well, with certain songs being more inspired than others. If anything in the album insert is to be believed, this can be explained by the very short time in which the album was written and recorded. By all appearances, Thrussell jams out a tune and never looks back, but in this reviewer's opinion, his music could clearly benefit from some added denseness, depth and compositional elasticity