|
"The Fourth Discontinuity"
Sisthema |
|
These guys have been watching entirely too many sci-fi movies lately. Thumbing through the lyric booklet, every song deals with some degree of man/machine interaction and the title, "The Fourth Discontinuity," the latest stage of evolvement of an actual scientific theory based upon man-machine interaction. Fair enough, we are in 2001. There's little surprise then that their self-proclaimed style is defined as "Cyber-Thrash Metal." I'll go along with that theory and do them one better. How about "Indefinable, incongruous and severely disturbed?" I've never heard anything quite this… odd. Sisthema's sound is shockingly intense, almost to the point where you're ears bleed before the first track, 'Distorthica's," played in its entirety. One things that jumps right out at you before long is how in the world can something so fiercely loud and riveting as this manage to be completely drowned out when the vocalist launches into one of his excruciating screams? I swear I've never before thought about wearing earplugs listening to a Goddamned CD! We can go on about this "Cyber-Thrash" stuff and while enough have experimented in this area before, Sisthema seems to take this apocalyptic idealism a step further than any mere mortal should dare at this early stage of the game. Hailing from Italy of all places, wine, roses and storybook endings seem to have little place in their annals. "Thrash" in the conventional sense might be a bit misleading-they're too far forward for such classification though its estimable their roots are based somewhere between early Thrash intensity and Hard-Core aggression… with more than a few remnants of industrialized distort in the vein of Pitchshifter or Ministry. Sisthema's not exactly ground breaking but they are picking up the slack where a few of others failed and even fewer have been bold enough to go. They need to add more variety (build more on the depth and minor melodic attributes of "Hydro" for starters) and maybe try to let a little light shine through Released by Noise Records Review by Vinnie Apicella
[va85@columbia.edu] |