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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Review: Silent Killer - Everyone Bleeds


Silent Killer – Everyone Bleeds
2009, Ohm Resistance


Brooklyn’s Silent Killer has a reputation for musical brutality on the Drum N Bass circuit, but his latest album, Everyone Bleeds is perhaps his most accessible album to date. Intermixing his killer Drum N Bass style with hip-hop (East and West), Electrohouse, musical atmospherics and vocal and music samples, Silent Killer has learned to hone his brutality with a spoonful of sugar. Influences include the Notorious B.I.G. and Don Davis, and the album receives some remix assistance from Breaker (Guerilla) and Submerged.

Everyone Bleeds opens with Savior, a hyperkinetic electronic binge mixing elements of Drum N Bass and Industrial. This is one of those songs where you just grab on and wait for the ride to be over; no quarter is given. Destroyer hits a bland and repetitive note, essentially becoming stuck in a loop that's truncated by a spoken word sample but repeats almost continuously throughout the song. Up next is Submerged's remix of Corpse, which plays like a bizarre dance club work-up of a horror movie chase scene. I had a hard time getting into this one because it seemed so at odds with itself. Rockers appears designed clearly for the club circuit, and will likely do well in that realm but doesn't amount to much more than a beat and a voiceover. The repetitive nature of the song makes it a difficult listen even halfway through. Supremacy hits some of the same issues with regard to repetition, although the passages are a bit more interestingly constructed.

Everyone Bleeds takes a bit more from the Industrial well, relying on a heavy rhythm, a similar sense of repetition and a voiceover key that helps to drive the song. The Great Machine opens with ambient synthesizer that becomes a staccato counter rhythm to the percussion. The composition from here becomes highly varied, using voice, drum and synth samples to build an extremely varied and percussive soundscape. Super Orgy (Breaker's Orgy Remix) takes on the speed and urgency of a thundering herd of horses but fails to bring anything new or original out of the composition, which retains a highly repetitive functional construction. This song slides into Amber as the two were one and the same.

Silent Killer's Everyone Bleeds is a highly average collection of Electronic compositions with some material very fit for the monochromatic club scene but little to really light up the synapses. If you're just looking to dance then this is a fine album, but there's not much original here; and there's not much to stretch either the listener or the artist.

Rating: 2.5 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Silent Killer at www.myspace.com/ohmresistance. (Check out their blog entry on Silent Killer here.) You can download a copy of Silent Killer at Amazon MP3 or iTunes. A CD version was released on April 27, 2009, but availability is sparse. If you send a message to Ohm Resistance through their MySpace page they might be able to direct you to someone selling physical CDs.

1 comment:

Dortha said...

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