The Silver Cord Is Severed

With the first three or four albums, Mortification once belonged to the most interesting and important thrash and death metal bands and their 92’s Scrolls of the Megilloth album belongs without doubt to the death metal classics.

However these times are far away and Mortification has changed a lot. With following releases, their albums became more influenced by various genres as modern thrash, power and heavy metal or hardcore. Surely, that would not be any problem. The problem is that it seems that during this evolution, Steve Rowe started to be concentrated more on the spreading of his religious message and forgot to play decent music. In my opinion, the 2001’s album The Silver Cord Is Severed is its best evidence and the weakest Mortification release to date at the same time.

So what is it all about? After taking the CD from the really ugly cover and putting it into a player, you will hear some 46 minutes of a music that can be described as some mixture of modern thrash and heavy metal with lot of HC / nu-metal influences. To be honest, the album is not total crap and it has its moments. All the musicians involved are really good players and they are able to compose solid riffs. There are enough sections where the listener can be impressed by nice riff and catchy melody or interesting tempo break. But after listening to the whole album, I have quite mixed (and mostly disappointed) feelings, as the album fails in many ways. What are the biggest problems?

1. There’s lack of intricate or anyhow interesting song structure. All the songs are built in the same manner – they have some 3 – 4 motives that alternate in very schematic way (verse / chorus / verse / chorus / bridge / verse…) with no natural and dynamic evolution and it makes no space to catch the listener’s attention by any surprise or something.

2. The sound – this is exactly what I imagine when someone says the album is overproduced. The sound is very clean and readable, but also very artificial and “blunt”- if you know what I mean - and thus it is very poor on any feeling of natural aggression or anger.

3. And the last problem is the Steve’s vocal. I am not fixed on death metal growling at all and I like if the vocalist tries to evolve somehow using different kinds of vocal, but I can’t help myself. Steve is great growler, but his high-pitched shouting is mostly annoying instead of being sharp and angry. This is his problem on most of the albums from this “experimental” era (but not all of them, listen to the 95’s Primitive Rhythm Machine) and I really don’ know, why he does it. Maybe he wants to make his lyrics understandable, but it harms the power of the music more than the mentioned bad production.

So overall – this is quite average album containing nice moments and some o.k. songs (Access Denied, Bring the Joy or Whom They Would Kill for example) for which I like it in some way and listen to it sometimes, but it is also full of defects I cannot ignore.