Susanna Lies in Ashes

The worst kind of melodic death metal album is a boring and forgettable one. An incompetent one may seem worse on the face of it, but you can at least remember them, and they can be occasionally fun. A drab one full of listless riffs and baby’s first melodies is never a good time. Especially not when given some kind of pseudo-proggy veneer, so it can be excused by saying that their brains are of a much bigger size than ours. Oh, you may think that the rhythms are braindead simple, or the songs sound like a collection of them hastily put together, but they’re all actually a part of this Machiavellian game of 4D chess where they magically all come together to create this insane fucking melody that’ll blow your fucking mind! All these melodies that sound like a mishmash of old school Opeth and Vehemence’s cult classic God Was Created played from memory – fuckin’ mint, brah!

That’s the overall impression I get from Susanna Lies in Ashes. The sort of hazy sound throughout, accentuated by the gothic overtones of the more downtrodden riffs, intermixed with some faster melodic death ones, all come together to create some rather basic melodies that somehow end up going nowhere. That’s what get me about this album. It becomes this malaise of vaguely decent segments of songs that only seem to come together from one another because they’re all such familiar motifs that they’re what come to mind when you think of a melodic death album at a vague level. Hooks must’ve been at a premium in 2010 because Relinquished don’t seem to have any here to make the songs pop out. There’s just nothing to really latch onto here either, as each riff just listlessly blurts out these generic melodies that go in one ear and out the other. Overall, it winds up making for a pretty boring experience that doesn’t really go anywhere.

As Susanna Lies in Ashes fades away into the background… okay, that basically happens like one minute into the album, but what I mean is that when the album ends, it’s like when the white noise fades away and all you end up with silence. I know I tend to give a band’s debut some leeway – understanding that the rough patches and unrefined parts are a part of the experience – but it needs to have something going for it, and Relinquished really don’t with their debut. Anything that might’ve been worth something is diluted by the overall daft execution.