I was picking a song and writing about it.
There’s a really hard thing about being an evangelical music fan. There’s a thing where you just want to grab someone and play them the song you love, a song that shakes your world.
What happens when all your friends are just not into it?
The song that rocks your world is just a bad noise to most people.
Welcome to my world. Now let me try to tell you about this classic.
Neurosis are an incredible band. They’ve been going 30 years. They haven’t cared for trends or anything that wasn’t their vision.
It’s amazing that Through Silver in Blood was 10 years into the bands career and yet was the first song of theirs most people heard, it was certainly was mine.
So how do I describe this song? How do you put a visceral music experience into words?
When I bought this album I thought I knew heavy music. I grew up listening to metal. I grew up loving Thrash and Death metal.
I thought Godflesh was the heaviest music could get.
Then I heard Through Silver in Blood.
From the Morricone harmonica over the almost industrial metal on metal drumming, the song just starts to build, the riff and drumming becoming more insistent, it grabs your attention.
Then the toms start.
The drums on this track are huge. Live, it’s the drummer and the guitarist on half kit to get the massive sound the track begins with. On record, it’s the panning on the drums that drags you into the song, the circling of the toms loop around your head when listening on headphones.
Then the main part of the song begins.
Slow, sludgy and crushing. Each syllable is torn from the vocalist’s throat, each note seems ripped from the guitar, the amps seem to be on the edge of distorting into noise, everything is pushed to the red and just projects fury.
The closest thing I can compare to us Like Rats by Godflesh, nothing else comes close to that visceral, crushing power.
And power is what this band is about.
Some bands love speed, Neurosis are about repetition and volume, to the point of bloody mindedness.
Its 7 minutes before any major change occurs in this song, then the guitars shift from the driving force of the song to providing texture, leaving the vocal and the drums to drive the song. It’s a relentless and very purposeful grind and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
13 minutes of face melting brilliance.
The ways of exile 