The Fifth Alliance - Death Poems - Review

Post-apocalyptic sludge is a form of musical art that is very close to the reviewer’s heart. The ability to create massive soundscapes that permeate the realm of reality and overwhelm the listener is what I perceive as tragedy. It doesn’t only attract and welcome the listener inside its world, but it also allows that listener to release emotional energy while being a spectator of a massive and crushing movement.

The Fifth Alliance have these aesthetics. Their gargantuan sound is a means to explore one’s deeply rooted despair and fear through a great movement. After all, we are all specks of dust into the infinite, destined to perish and return into the unknown and unattained nothingness. But, until that time comes, we struggle, we love and we get hurt. We fight for a better world, we try to free ourselves from our demons and seek inner peace.

Is this the mentality that Sylvia, the band’s singer, expresses through her performance? What would it take for your screams and shrieks and shouts to be fully and unapologetically expressed? She screams repeating phrases that echo a need for release, an intense force to free oneself from guilt, shame, pain while the guitars move with a slow but crushing pace. The drummer sets steady rhythms and the leads are a sensitive narration that accompanies the singer’s performance; and at times the whole movement merges and becomes an assault.

While the steady building pace of the song creates a massive structure, the shrieking voice appears until the riffs come crushing. The bass holds the walls of sound intact while there is bounce between the echoes of the singer, which are that of despair and deep emotional strife and the steady and massive vibration of the music; a contrast that gives birth to a uniquely sensitive being. This album gives away the feeling of the humane struggle to free oneself from the world and ascend to the spiritual.

I have experienced this immense fire towards the unknown, not only through meditation but also through art that functions as a transcendental agent and The Fifth Alliance are moving unto these territories. “Death poems” is about the spiritual experience that comes not through peace, but through war, through a massive movement that brings about a worldly realization that resistance is futile. It expresses an amalgam of the beyond and the here, the unknown and the known, a conversation between the frail-voice and the firm-music; a slow dance in front of the inevitable collapse of our being and they are doing so with the passion of a rough artist that is being haunted by demons. 

Recommended track: Death Poems

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