Suffocate for Fuck Sake - Fyra

Angry Metal Guy 40

Suffocate for Fuck Sake¹ was one of those bands I’d heard good things about, but never quite got around to listening to properly. They’ve been around in the post-metal scene since 2004, though they never quite made it to “big name” status. They disappeared for nearly a decade, which probably didn’t help, before releasing their third album In My Blood in 2017. Here on the imaginatively titled Fyra (“Four”), they continue a tradition of tackling heavy topics with a theme of addiction. But does the writing have the gravity to tackle such a serious subject?

Fyra‘s sound will be immediately familiar to existing fans of Suffocate for Fuck Sake and of fellow post-metal Swedes Cult of Luna. Long, complex songs swap between ambient passages beautiful in their bleakness and furious, abrasive guitar riffs. Vocals are primarily a pained hardcore-y scream, with occasional cleans mixed in. New on this album is a more electronic twist in some of the quiet sections. At times (the outro on “From the Window,” for example) this recalls Steven Wilson‘s Hand. Cannot. Erase. This is an interesting idea and, combined with the band’s heavy use of Swedish spoken word samples, differentiates SFFS from Cult of Luna, Rosetta and the like. All the right components are here.

Fyra by Suffocate for fuck sake

Unfortunately, the construction of it all is just awkward. Transitions between sections are nearly universally abrupt switches—a heavy section thundering out of nowhere, or a last loud note dying away to be replaced by an ambient section or spoken word. It’s not that this is always a bad thing. Done well, a sudden pivot hits hard. But this is every time, every song. Any sense of coherency, any momentum a song builds, is squandered every time a section careers off a cliff and, like the unfortunate Wile E Coyote, drops away without a trace. It feels like trying to listen to the radio while a malicious gremlin occasionally flips the channel between a Cult of Luna performance and a depressing Swedish play. This is compounded by the sheer length of the album. At over an hour and 20 minutes, there’s a full album of music and a radio play in here. Mind you, my Swedish is limited to the traveler’s staple “I’ll have a beer, please.” It’s possible I’d find it less intrusive if I could follow it better. (But English spoken word normally annoys me too, so probably not.)

The maddening thing about all of this is that there’s quite a few really cool moments in here. On the couple of occasions I’ve put Fyra on in the background and let it grab my attention when it will, a number of great sections have bubbled up. I love the dual-layered clean and harsh vocal lines (“15 Missed Calls,” and particularly “Hope”‘s mixed reprise of an earlier clean line). There are loads of cool melody lines and riffs from the guitars (“Cosmopol,” “Alone,” “Behind the Door,” etc). Where the album reaches for the odd hopeful moment among the bleakness, it’s also largely successful, deploying some pretty female vocals (“Hope,” “Here”). But every time it hits its stride, it cuts away and obliterates all the work it had done to get to that point.

While I wasn’t previously super familiar with SFFS, I spun their back catalog while working on this review and enjoyed it a lot. Fyra seems to have suffered from over-ambition. In (commendably) trying to tell a big, serious multi-part story about addiction, the composition has developed a number of flaws that weren’t there previously. The band’s talents are still clear here and there in the actual music. But the music and the meaning gets lost in too many sharp transitions and long sections of talking. In the end, Fyra is far too frustrating a listen to recommend.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 192 kbps mp3
Label: Moment of Collapse Records
Websites: suffocateforfucksake.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/SuffocateFFS
Releases Worldwide: April 16th, 2021

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