"The Tenth Sub Level of Suicide"'s insert touts its music as "Dark Art for the Satanic Elite", a sentiment metalheads would accept as truth and be thoroughly pleased with as an opportunity to hear something vile and putrid, but under the facade of evil lies grease paint and bald-faced teenage arrogance. Billed by the "cutting edge" (read: hipster) Aquarius Records as "pure misanthropic musical mayhem", this band simultaneously fails to meet these proclamations and, worse yet, insult black metal as a genre.
The album lurches forward with some ambient sounds and then Wrest mutters some "nihilistic" phrases, condemning the listener to an hour of audial hell. By that I do not mean "audial hell" in the Abruptum sense of the word (that would be good), but rather from the painful realization that you're going to bear a tedious, meandering album. The music generally drags on and on but always seems like it might go somewhere interesting, like a grubby man that has put you into his rusty van with the promise of candy once you get to his house. You know it's a horrible lie, yet you just can't resist those Swedish fish!
All of the instruments are clear and audible. You can hear the bass plunking away in the background, the drums are clear and not one piece of the kit is too loud, and the guitars are distinct. All would seem well, but no thanks to the obscene amount of delay, reverb, and distortion, the vocals just run into each other, becoming a formless, grating, indistinct whirring that refuses to go away. The production itself is "dark", murky and hollow, but not in the sense of "Pure Fucking Armageddon" where the raw sound was caused by budget constraints which inadvertently made the music sound evil. No, this is simply some San Francisco hipster's idea of what "old school" black metal production should sound like. The insert's boasting of the 4-track which recorded the album underscores the depths of Wrest's arrogance as well as expose his disingenuous attitude towards black metal. How kvlt of you, Jeff! The murkiness hinders the instrumentation and causes it to resemble an esteemless, scrawny, weak janitor.
The riffs themselves are mostly tremolo picked lines, some minor thirds to achieve a depressing sound and power chords for a more traditional sound, all mashed together without any sense of logic, going from one mood to another with no proper transition. It seems as though he scrounged together a few good riffs, threw some filler into the mix, and then rolled a 20 sided die to figure out what order to place them in. I must admit, the opening riff to "Mine Molten Armor" is neat. The bass doesn't always follow the guitars, but you really have to pay attention to hear it. Sometimes it sounds fine, but on a few tracks it has a very "Korn" like feel. You know what I mean, that plunky, too much high end, almost slap bass sound (see Sardoniscorn). The piano adds nothing significant to the atmosphere, and the ambient portions sound like a bunch of half-assed reverberated sounds, with some being played backwards and others just droning on ad infinitum. Songs seem to go someplace, but stop short and lumber about like a drunken bitch struggling to decide which lucky football player to suck off.
This is actually a concept album, a fact that has escapes all too many people. There are ten songs (the ten sub levels of suicide) detailing torment, suicide, depression, and far too many fragmented thoughts. The lyrics read like a morbid fourteen year old girl's LiveJournal who is trying to persuade herself to commit suicide, yet doesn't want to do it because her mind is made of mush (she is a woman, after all). They're often quite childish and come off as disingenuous, as well is incomprehensible at times. Here is an excerpt:
"come with us
you belong to us
kill yourself
you deserve this"
Long ago, I read an interview with Wrest and he said that some kid came into the tattoo parlor where he worked and gave him a copy of Filosofem. He listened to that fifty times, along with Mutiilation's Vampires of Black Imperial Blood and decided that if he took each album to an extreme that he would create the ultimate black metal album. He recognizes the aesthetics of the genre and nothing else. Wrest needs to pick up the latest Stephenie Meyer book, a new vibrator, and leave heavy metal alone.