It’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)
https://en-gb.facebook.com/pages/Final-Silence/285063909881
01/09/2013 at 11:00 am
Hey Andrew,
Thanks for the review. Agreed though the album was just a bag of ideas that we really didn’t think through and
eventually turn out pretty basic and all over the place. Although since then we have introduced a fifth member
to the line up of the band and seen a change in musicians/members only just this year we released our second
album ‘More Human Than Human’.
Personally we feel this album is leagues better than our debut in a more mature way through writing, song structure
and lyrically. Even though you were disappointed with our first release would you mind listening to our second album if you could spare half an hour of your time? Listen here at http://www.soundcloud.com/finalsilence we would really appreciate your opinion on this release.
Thank you for your time.
01/09/2013 at 12:15 pm
Got to admit I did not notice that this was a 2011 release when it was sent in via Casket. Not really sure why they put it out for review when you have a new one and are seemingly self released now.
08/09/2013 at 7:51 pm
Yeah to be honest our relationship with casket has been non existant due to a break down in communication and didn’t even know that they were sending it out to anyone. So we released our second album ourselfs.