Thesyre
Exist!
Osmose
Productions
2006
I have always been a huge fan
of Thesyre and thought I knew pretty much what I could expect from them.
Man, was I mistaken! Their new album Exist blows away most of my
preconceptions. First off this is a one track musical epic of roughly 33
minutes which in itself is fairly rare and even rarer that someone can succeed
at pulling off such a feat without losing focus or without huge amounts of
needless repetition. Thesyre have taken their trademark midtempo Black N'
Roll style and used it as a foundation for all sorts of musical excursions from
thrash to industrial to somber acoustic passages which eventually lead back to
that aforementioned impregnable foundation. Exist has some really
monumental passages such as the mosh inducing Thrash breakdown at the 2:30 mark.
Another one is the eerie ambient segment that gives way to and underpins
acoustic guitar strumming at the 12:30 mark and continues to develop in subtle
back and forth mutations until around the 18 minute mark. Musical themes
don't recur too often throughout Exist's entirety mainly relying on similar yet
alternating militant black metal marches that tie together the disparate strands
that make up this intricate spider web. I say spider web because it is a
perfect analogy for the album which is both beautiful and deadly serious in its
purpose! The vocals cross the entire spectrum from a harmonious choir, to
clean to shouted chants. But for the most part they are the raspy and
vomitous spewing of lyrical tyranny that we have become accustomed to from
Thesyre. Exist is Thesyre's bold statement that growth can do great things
for a band especially when it crushes expectations underneath the marching boots
of battalions of hardened metal extremists.
I think the best way to visualize Exist is in the way it mirrors the myriad of
experiences that a person will face through their existence with its use of a
myriad of musical threads woven tightly together to form a unified yet venomous
tapestry. "I see it clear, all the gods are dead!" But just perhaps
a new one has been born.