SLIT - Ode To Silence CD

Motherfuckin headbanging album for thrashers, sludgeheads and corers alike, yet with retro moments to chill out to!!!! And coming from one not so particularly languished about my homeland SLIT’s earlier career, such a comment is respect which SLIT earned their way. Always a band to pursue its own path, SLIT have along the years stripped down their nu-metal breaks of their youthful fascination to allow more sludge DOWN/ELECTRIC WIZARD influences merge with their hardcore/thrash stronghold. The most exponential of the Maltese heritage of all Maltese bands, using the Maltese cross as a point of reference in their tattoo art, website, CD sleeve, lyrics, and anything they do and anywhere they go, maybe it is this very iconography that has helped their DIY hard work be received with so much interest to garner support from UK’s Anticulture Records, paving off with a slot at the latest Hellfest in France. Enter “Ode to Silence” and silence it is not as this foursome immediately blast through your speakers with opener “Final Stance”, grabbing and twisting your genitals and serving them back to you as breakfast juice in its short yet assertive timespan. Next up is “…. Of Serpents”, a thrasher indeed yet allowing a prog CORONER touch. And then “Down the Gut”, a pit-breaker for all that is metalcore. “Ode to Silence” being a concept album “of how the mafia’s (la malavita) ways are fused into people’s ideology and everyday living ….. the ways of the mafia in places like Malta and Sicily…..’’, it is a natural call to arms to proceed with a good measure of Maltese and Italian verse. Unforgiving fury verses (albeit sounding at times slightly nasal) in turn enhanced by riffs that alternate from sharp hardcore/thrash monoliths (all throughout the album) to bluesy passages (“Omerta`”) to taking a step back in honour of the leaf (“White Shotgun”, “La Mano Nera” and overwhelmingly fascinating “Catharsis”). Not to forget the drumming that is as solid-to-the-bone or refined as the moment calls for, and the awesome bass guitar thrills aplenty, culminated on closer “Il-Halfa”, (Maltese for “the Oath”) ……… ostja madonna Joker x’zerriegha titimek il-mummy?! (*excuse my reviewer indulgence of venting that out in Maltese*). In my opinion the album’s winner is undoubtedly “The Bleeding Rose of Fate”, which bleeds of pain lived from its opening “To all the things that made me become this way; To all the moments that made me face this day” menacing vocals to its course of presenting the listener with the best thrash riff on this album before breaking into a BIOHAZARD inspired chorus which in turn makes way to a doomsday sludge riff that brings this song to its close, with lyrics representing the rage of adults suffering a capitalist world as the teenage urge to change it alike. SLIT by no means being the most original band under the sun yet merging their influences well enough as a dangerous shot through your head, “Ode to Silence” is heavy enough to make one press the repeat button on the CD player, which in today’s ever-growing metal world is enough mean feat by itself.