Sitting down and listening to Servile Sect’s companion album to the great TRVTH has been a sincerely surreal experience in part because I have only just started diving into TRVTH on a regular basis in the attempts to suck all the marrow of its impressive soul and for the other part due to a nagging feeling in the back of my head whenever the companion album (SVRRENDER) is playing, and, at least initially, I cannot help but feel that perhaps SVRRENDER does not have that little extra “je ne sais quoi”; now I know what you are thinking (“you always say that it is unfair to compare records to other records and should listen to records purely on their own merits”) and in most cases that would be the correct thought process, but SVRRENDER is a full on companion album to TRVTH so this fact makes it necessary to do so.
Here is the rub though (or maybe even the meat of the album); SVRRENDER takes time to truly familiarize yourself with all of the nuances and sounds that the duo of Servile Sect have imbued throughout this cassette tape, and maybe because of this necessary immersion into the twisted sonic landscape that peppers your consciousness with a myriad of textures and a Technicolor rainbow of aural timbres. SVRRENDER feels subtly more punishing than its companion as Servile Sect seemingly have imbued this record with a bit more of an aggressive tact with the manner in which the songs come right at the listener, but in any case, this album definitely gives me the impression that it is coming from a drastically different mind set this go round; and just maybe that is the charm of the tape in that as you listen to the tape and become a little accustomed to its at times disorienting shifts from noisy interludes to full on crushing black metal pieces, you get a strange taste of the dichotomy of Servile Sect and of the full sonic powers that the duo wields, which is significant in it of itself as you are treated to aural bombardments as well as some of the most soothing droning moments that seem veritably pensive and serene.
Servile Sect continues to impress with SVRRENDER as they once again show a broad arsenal of sonic manipulation abilities that they marry with an equally strong grasp of composition (regardless of how unorthodox it may seem), and while this whole tape is excellent, when you flip the tape to the B-Side, that is when the record gets even more unorthodox and disorienting and, well, awesome.
