Dwid Hellion is an almost comically dark personality. For the last 25 years, Hellion has served as the head yawper and sole constant member of Integrity, an act that helped pioneer metalcore by stripmining punk rock’s firmament and flooding it with the influence of doom, thrash, and psychedelic rock. Their sound has been inestimably influential, helping to fork the path that bands such as Converge, Hatebreed, and a million others have since traveled.
Musical import aside, though, Hellion’s often-discomfiting view of the world has fueled not only Integrity’s longevity but also, to an extent, listeners’ interest in the band. To follow Integrity is, in some sense, to wait for Hellion to say something generally disagreeable, to appreciate the screaming troll at the end of the microphone. To wit, Hellion is a fan of Charles Manson, having released his music on his own label, incorporated him prominently in the band’s art, and publicly called him an American folk hero. Once asked to comment on the human condition, Hellion simply replied, “Humankind is a diseased animal.” And his mantra of sorts is “Love is the only weapon.” That might sound like a Bob Marley bumper sticker, but Hellion goes further, saying that love is a great reset button for all those bodies “incarcerated within rotting flesh. Through love, we wish to destroy these confines.” Get the grunter a Hallmark contract.
Suicide Black Snake, Integrity’s fitful new LP on excellent Baltimore imprint A389, reaffirms both of Integrity’s key qualities-- that scathing attitude and cross-stitched aesthetic-- in 10 decidedly strange songs. Granted, the bulk of Suicide Black Snake might sound at first like clinical and belligerent hardcore. That’s mostly a symptom of Hellion’s voice, which has stiffened into a coarse bark as he’s aged, even since 2010’s more obviously warped The Blackest Curse.
But beneath the surface, these songs reveal complicated arrangements played entirely by multi-instrumentalist Robert Orr, essentially the one-man musical puppeteer behind Integrity. During “There Is a Sign”, for instance, a rudimentary blast of black metal drums pushes behind a slow riff that’s dense and distorted enough to fit within an Eyehategod album; Hellion, meanwhile, spews over the top of it all, his unapologetic hardcore growl giving the moment its surprising third dimension. The song soon accelerates into a punk rupture before pivoting, unexpectedly, into a spiraling guitar solo. “I Know Where Everyone Lives” opens with a classic rock, crying-guitar prelude that suggests Cream; in less than a minute, though, it’s pogoed into a ferocious circle pit, with Hellion roaring inside his self-made lane of commanding comfort. Orr returns to that 70s excess for closer “Lucifer Before the Day Doth Go”, a blacklight-on, lighters-out rock’n’roll anthem if only Hellion did more than scream over it.
By way of easy comparison, Hellion’s voice in Integrity makes the way that Damian Abraham leads Fucked Up sound delicate and considered. Especially on Suicide Black Snake, Hellion overruns everything, his vocal opprobrium working as the oblivious bull laying waste to the proverbial china shop. Always an acquired taste, it’s occasionally a bit too much and too little here. Hellion can’t match Orr’s nimble approach on the failed hall of mirrors “Into the Night”; when the music disappears behind him at the end of “There Is a Sign”, his voice feels at once like a marvel and an unnecessary overcompensation, as though all these years of rotating band members have made him defensive of his dominant role in Integrity. At least he completely owns the more straightforward hardcore blasts such as “+Orrchida” and “Beasts as Gods”. Still, a quarter century into a project, shouldn’t mastery of the fundamentals be a foregone conclusion?
Perhaps it’s time for Hellion to give his customarily martial role a rest. After all, the most remarkable track here and the reason for returning again and again to Suicide Black Snake doesn’t even use it. “There Ain’t No Living in Life” is a doomy blues tune that suggests Neurosis playing Mountain Jam; Hellion speaks slow and low over Slint-like guitars, adding harmonica just before the weight of the drums come crashing in. The darkness is still there-- “There is no light in this tunnel, and there is only one escape,” he intones. But it’s more visceral, relatable, and desperate, the sound of the blues given a shot of steel. This slow-burn is likely just an Integrity album anomaly-- because there’s generally at least one-- and not a new direction. Maybe it should be.
