Sybreed - Revive My Wounds

Sometimes we just have to accept that the best things in life don’t last as long as we want them to, or at least that’s what my wife says. I’m assuming that she’s talking about the not-nearly-long-enough tenure of the criminally underrated Sybreed, because frankly I have no clue what else she could be inferring.

At a scant decade, the runtime of the Swiss industrial metal could certainly have been enjoyed for much longer. But what we did get in those ten years – four albums and two EPs of crushing goodness – more than made up for the fact that we won’t get any more. Sybreed always had that gooey caramel centre of neck-strainingly heavy industrial but topped it off with something a little different with every release; be it a few sprinkles of more purist drum and bass in 2004 full length debut Slave Design, or a more soft-serve approach that replaced some of the sharper chocolate chips (no, I’m not struggling a bit with this metaphor already, shut up) a la 2009’s The Pulse of Awakening.

We’ve landed somewhere in the middle with our choice for the Rock Song of the Week this time around, taking a page from the fantastic Antares from 2007. Revive My Wounds showcases a lot of that experimental side I mentioned before, stringing together huge walls of guitar sound with plenty of electronic chirps and swooshes that culminate in an almost ethereal sounding chorus. The drum work, provided by session drummer Dirk Verbeuren of Soilwork fame, is absolutely earth-shaking to boot; the last minute or so sounds like Dirk has about six legs working different drum pedals. It’s ace, to put it much more efficiently.

Enough pandering, then! This is your treat to start, end or just cruise along that tough middle part of a Friday where you’re just waiting to get over the middle of the day at work. I’d say don’t listen to it all at once, but that sort of goes against the point of a song, really. Listen to it all, and then listen to it all a few more times as a reward for the first one instead.