Who Dies in Siberian Slush?
By the means of keyboard introduction to “Leave me”, Russian doom/death metal band Who Dies in Siberian Slush introduces the serious intentions to occupy the next 45 minutes of the listener’s time and fill them with the honest, but depressing, funereally touched music. Along with the thundering roll, the band brings down on the head of listener a sturdy, heavy oak door of the bunker, where it seems like the album had been composed and recorded. Exactly with such a taste of gore on your lips, the listener wakes up after several minutes of the first track and understands: there is nowhere to go. There is no will to go. There is nothing wanted, except to throw the head back and merge with that drought atmosphere of the black swamp. Here, everything is not so dark and doomed as it may be concluded from the last phrase, but with the special touch of it ... This music does not beget the image forms in your brain; it gives the information portion by portion and does not let the listener to think, by closing the eyes just pour and hang in that black mire: “All my sins are because of me”.
The general impression of the album implies the monolith wall of very well produced sound, where every song merges with another one very lightly where both are supporting each other. Such a scenario holds the listener in a chosen direction without letting him rest, without giving him a hope for gulp of fresh air in that suffocating black swamp.
“The woman we are looking for” is a mean man’s cry in the name of the female one, who we are looking for all our life long and getting stuck, we come back to the same point. While listening to this music and understanding the lyrics it becomes obvious that “instinct driven” impulses are just futile efforts like trying to hook on the air during the downfall. The song presents a very beautiful guitar solo and maybe the most spectacular theme development possible to hear on this album. The jagged bridge shakes the indifferent body ... The vocals are resonating somewhere inside and finding no way out, gets absorbed, leaving a salty taste of blood on the lips ...
Perhaps the oldest and the most well-known composition is “Mцbius ring” finds its place on this album. It is a slow, exemplary type of funeral doom metal... It states that the life is pointless and words have lost now their significance. The darkness constrained the body and put on the greyness of a workaday life, which was nothing but a fake. The composition has a very dynamic ending, where the red line of soloing guitar spins around the neck, preventing from breathing in a far very dense environment ...
Involving some fresh air into the story, the band includes the wonderful keyboard played interlude, where it let the listener to rest and enjoy the beautiful tones until the next strike will appear. For the sake of clarity it is required to mention that the next song “The Testament of Gumiliov” contains Russian lyrics written by a poet of Silver century (such a period in Russian poetry), specifically, his own testament, which is forming the most suitable combination with music. The seamlessness of the duo makes the required lines of the listener’s consciousness to tremble and after the attentive listening it is not so far from a really total depression, such an impact the lyrics and the musical reflections have...
Feeding the listener with the second beautiful instrumental track, the band pictures the cold wintering way along somewhere in the middle of Siberian wastelands, giving a fine, ordinary and fair acoustic guitar piece before the last strike. The last path “The Bitterness of the Years That Are Lost” is the longest one. It is an apogee of the alcohol depression, a dynamic culmination to the black oblivion. Again, the red line appears, being slippery because of the oozed, but not coagulated blood, it twists along the body and the listener feels its tickling action. It is the maximum allowed mixture of the alcohol and blood, when it is still possible to get back to life in order to listen to this piece of work at least one more time. The length of the album favours the last point and is actually perfect for all the feelings and impressions to dip into, where just a wake up is needed thereafter, to shake of the dust and go living the life again. The band does not overload the listener with information it opens here, sometimes showing up as naпve in some moves which are nothing but pure fairness in our condemned world of lies. They let the listener to search his own approach in understanding; and here the task does not look very difficult.
The grey tones and rawness of the cover art are amplifying the impression and finishing the whole life concept that this album is creating and holding. In addition, the frontal picture is showing up the faceted glass (200 mL) of vodka with a black bread crust layered up on it. It is a very Russian tradition to leave it on table (along with the empty plate and spoon/fork ensemble) during the funeral commemoration feast, showing up the spiritual presence of the deceased. Sometimes such an ensemble is placed on a tomb of the deceased person in order to “feed the spirit in the underworld”.
A strongly good record, firmly produced, being a great accomplishment of Primordial Records, which holds speciality in the field of doom metal. WDISS is a good example (if not leaders) of Russian doom metal we have a pleasure to enjoy nowadays.