Review
Integrity
Suicide Black Snake

Take this raging slab of an album and play it on your stereo at loud volumes until your fragile eardrums explode causing you to bleed out of your ear canals because Integrity is back with another record of metal / hardcore anthems that delve the dark side the way that only Dwid and his cohorts can (with this record he continues working with Robert Orr); and, just like the best Integrity records, Suicide Black Snake is not without its own intrigue and speculation.

Please allow me to digress and explain a bit about Suicide Black Snake because except for the raging title track, “There Is A Sign”, the blues inflected “There Ain’t No Living In Life”, and “Into The Night”, the other six (more than half of the album) songs are re-recorded versions that come from either the Detonate VVorld’s Plague EP or the split single with Gehenna; now for those that do not voraciously hunt down every version of every single release that Integrity releases or for those that do hungrily gobble up every version of every release from Dwid and company, this would not be an issue; but for a minority, this might be.

Those people are fools because this Suicide Black Snake is a raging and seething slab of music that certainly recalls Integrity at its best both creatively and powerfully, and those people will miss out on a vicious whirlwind of fomented metallic hardcore that the band had a hand in inventing in the first place; delivering an excellent album that lives up to the immense legacy of the band may seem a daunting and thankless task, but Dwid and Orr continue to push the work into more and more interesting directions that encompasses not just the music but the artwork as well, which seems to match the dark and foreboding music just about as perfect as can be. I find myself drawn to the title track (just one of the darker songs in the Integrity canon), “I Know Where Everyone Lives” and its crushing raw sound, and the blistering “All Is None”; but save for the “There Ain’t No Living In Life” and the closing “Lucifer Before The Day Doth Go”, Suicide Black Snake simply rips.

Suicide Black Snake is a really good album that is short and sweet and hits hard with a pretty raw recording that seems to enhance its urgency and regardless of how you feel about what Integrity has previously done, this album is gripping and shows that these artists still create vital works even after all these years (particular the artwork by Dwid on this album is one of the band’s best).