Feel free to judge by its cover

Suffer. Decay. Alone. is the debut album release from Above & Below, an industrial side project from Plaguewielder front man Bryce Seditz. The intricate cover art for Suffer Decay Alone, designed by Chris Smith, tells everything there is to know about what is contained within this album. The visual distortion effect represented by the glitch art is audibly reflected in all of the album’s tracks, creating an industrial soundscape with electronic exposition. Located on the bottom of the cover, the upside-down woman participating in shibari plants a subtle notion of sexiness, a sexiness that can be perceived within the fragments of syncopated grooves contained within several of the tracks. The words printed on the cover, “Tear myself apart to begin again. Sinking in the hole again of intrusive thoughts and dead-end friends,” delineates exactly with the album is all about, a topic not far from most black metal—depression.

The album’s title is pulled from the second track “Rust,” which is also visually depicted as the cover art’s color scheme. This mid-tempo song starts out with heavy, elongated electronic rips prior to the opening line of repetition, “rust covered skin.” The chorus utilizes a variety of “whomps” to create movement and push forward the lyrics which drag slightly behind the beat.

The album’s vocals leave room for improvement. Instead of varying interest, they mostly remain at a constant, over-produced raspy yell throughout every track. Something as small as crescendoing the quick background licks as they move higher up the melodic scale could add intrigue. However, as this album is essentially about depression, maybe this was purposeful. Depression involves missing out on the beautiful modulations of life. Depression is sometimes being so numb that one is tricked into believing that nothing ever changes, that life just drags on in exasperating monotony. Maybe that anxious, cold detachment was what Seditz was attempting to express.

The third track “Hope” contains deep bass and higher-pitched electronic sounds but seemed to be missing a medium range of frequency, holding the listener in a void within its inauspicious disposition. To further that feeling, there are about thirty seconds of this song that takes seemingly forever to come to a natural pause. A cornucopia of asynchronous sounds creates this massive space that leaves the listener holding their breath and begging for a beat to drop. After this agonizing period, a nod to Darude’s “Sandstorm” could be heard in the background, constructing a titillating, almost jazzy feel within the song’s middle section. The music takes a slow fade out towards the end, assumingly because the “Hope” did too.

The penultimate track “Tear” is another mid-tempo song with a straightforward layout. It starts out with a simple drum pattern incorporating loose snare on the backbeats above a melodic growling bass sound executing a half note, quarter, quarter pattern. The layers continue to build with crash cymbal and more movement from the bassline, then adding in the vocals which feature the top set of lyrics found on the cover art and lastly filling in the remaining space with a menacing swinging guitar line. As a brief outlier to what was mentioned earlier, “Tear” actually contains a short, additional vocal line which uses an enhancing effect bearing resemblance to the singing cowboy from the “You Don’t Always Die from Tobacco” commercial who uses an electronic larynx to speak. Was this also on purpose? As a demonstration of how it would sound if the voice was torn? Or was this just a fun addition? The world may never know.

Suffer. Decay. Alone. isn’t a standout, but it’s a solid twenty-seven minutes worthy of a listen from just the cover art alone. There were some chances taken and some genres crudely spliced, but being here for the passion projects is what fans are for. Hopefully, Above & Below will continue to develop and won’t have to Suffer Decay Alone.