FinalIt’s not every day that you hear a hardcore gang chant with skirling bagpipes in the background. That’s before a techno remix of an earlier track “Riding a Redhead” which brings this album to an end. If such eccentricity and innovation had been in evidence earlier, but “We Are This For A Reason” drifted for the most part in and out of my psyche like changing consciousness.

Technically this debut album from the Scottish quartet Final Silence is fine but like the drone of the bagpipes, which only feature briefly on “I’ll Die Fighting” and in my view rightly so, it’s flat rather than energetic. Maybe it’s the production or it goes on for too long. Yet it starts ok with the thumping technical hardcore of “Jaw Ripper”. The music, style and theme are downtrodden by nature. There’s a nice subtle instrumental passage. sound. “You Wanna Rape This?” cannot be accused of subtlety. To be honest if they can’t come up with something better than this, they might as well give up. Misogynistic and nihilistic lyrics apart, the strengths lie in the musical accompaniments rather than the dull and straight-line hardcore centre. Far better are the haunting choruses of the first two tracks. Once they break into technical musicianship instead of representing a constantly grey and bleak world, it’s fine. “Jaw Ripper” has a deeper atmosphere akin to Disbelief. Even “You Wanna Rape This?” has a marching quality which finally introduces energy. The marching military style suits this band, and “What The Hell’s This Crap Supposed To Be?”, one of the best tracks, shares this quality without diluting the message. “Everybody hates me”, they whisper, contrasting with the impressive screams. This track shows they have ideas but there’s almost an inbuilt desire to stick to a nihilistic pattern. Accordingly Final Silence stick mostly to norms as if they are obliged to, instead of allowing themselves some creative freedom. Most of the tracks on this album are despairing and bleak. I actually preferred the techno version of “Riding a Redhead”. The original is machine-like but has no distinctive qualities. Even worse is the slower “Just For Once”. It doesn’t work. It’s dreary and colourless. The clean vocal and acoustic interlude on “What Have We Done” doesn’t really work with hardcore but it’s welcome. After “Wired At The Heart”, which has the most pointless break in history, there’s a really good track “Wired At The Heart”. It’s meatier than the others, well controlled and features a dreamy haunting section with a good clean voice, which can be a rare quality in hardcore. This precedes the scream-laden and heavy “I’ll Die Fighting”, which in spite of this manages to be nondescript and character-free until those bagpipes intervene towards the end.

I can’t deny that this album has attitude but it wasn’t one I enjoyed. There were good bits here and there but overall I found “We Are This For a Reason” to be just too grey like a November day in a dismal industrial city and a struggle to listen to.

(4.5/10 Andrew Doherty)

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