Album Review: Suffering Quota – Sisyphean Life
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Sisyphus. Cursed forever to roll a boulder uphill, only for it to tumble back down, only to be rolled up anew, only to tumble once more. It makes an obvious parallel to how many of us feel about our own lives, trudging away on a caged treadmill, at once active yet immobile, all the effort in the world gone towards staying in place. Wake work sleep, wake work sleep. On and on, lapse into a tired, nondescript retirement, shuffle around for a bit about as fast as a bag of regrets ever can do, killing time until, finally, it kills you. The daily grind can get us down. Which is I always recommend daily grind. Todays’ offering speaks specifically to the quotidian rut many of us find ourselves slouching through; Suffering Quota claim to explore “recurring patterns of depression, monotony, and the perpetual search for fleeting moments of relief. There are no triumphant resolutions here, only the recognition that some struggles return again and again”. Sound familiar? If so, then maybe Suffering Quota can speak to the restless frustration that burns inside of you, too.
Packing more riffs into eighteen micron-tight minutes than most bands manage in a career Suffering Quota epitomise the suppressed rage those of us in dead-end bullshit jobs endure as we physically feel our lives waste away beneath us. Scorching death and thrash rear end grimy sludge at appalling speed as the band backflip through undulating, ceaseless movements. Trains of powerchords hurtle along pounding blastbeat tracks with military precision, the band rocketing through gears to slam down on the brakes with teeth-splintering doom on “Strain”. The death metal core of “Cruel Rock” yields to grinding discordant chords wrapping themselves about each other’s throats on “Overpowering Weight”, which also swings for the old school hardcore crowd with crusty punk riffs midway through. That’s the first three songs – the band cycles through sections hair breadths from each other as though they’re belt fed.
Fast and technical without being clinical or sterile, a raw, bug-eyed production pens the final variable into the seriously pissed off equation that the band have been writing. At points, broadsides of riffs and blasts merge into a white noise scream of distilled rage, ably chaperoned by the demented shrieking of vocalist Gerald Timmermans. The band toy with meter and time signature, “Striving” punctuating bouts of gratuitous violence with blunt stop-start grooves. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the Ape Unit album that I reviewed not so long back. It takes itself much more seriously, but the darting between sections, the contortions it makes from track to track, the variations it displays over it’s runtime make it something of a more straight-laced twin in some senses. Industrial sustained notes by way of Godflesh surfing on massed piranha shoals of Napalm Death riffs on “Roll Back Down”. “Slope” prowls the yard with the diseased thrash-on-crack stylings of Pig Destroyer, before peering through the wrong window at the misanthropic doom it closes the track with. Each track a fresh wound in the polite facade we greet the corporate world with.
Life seems to have purpose only when you force it to. Misery is comfortable; the call centre job siphoning your soul away down the phone lines that you stay at because it was easier to swallow than finding something new. The rough, loveless relationship that was less scary than being alone. Friends you lost because it was too much to admit you were wrong. Holding patterns of human misery trickling to the drain, taking you with it step by weary step. If there’s one thing that you take from Sisyphean Life, I hope it’s the strength to make whatever change you need to be happy. However you feel though, whenever you have a spare eighteen minutes to fill with a blitzkrieg of molten catharsis, accept no substitute.
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