The Secret – Solve Et Coagula

I am absolutely loving Southern Lord’s recent emphasis on filthy and crusty hardcore. Over the past few months the label dropped the lethal sounding Heavy Breathing LP by Black Breath and re-released Nails’ Unsilent Death LP. The former mixed an Entombed sounding death drone amongst a chunk of aggressive metal and hardcore whilst the latter was simply an excellent 14 minute blast-a-thon. But It isn’t really a coincidence that The Secret’s’ Solve Et Coagula should fit in so well with Black Breath, Nails, Cursed et al as they all had the Kurt Ballou treatment; and it is fair to say that you could put on a bunch of recent tough sounding records and pick out those that have first passed through the ears of the Converge guitarist.

Ballou has often said that his recording and production techniques were designed to take his mind back to those small hardcore shows of his youth, where the dingy and volume filled shows would fill the room the a huge amount of energy. I have no idea what he does to make these records sound so raw, so brutal, and more importantly away from today’s polished extreme metal albums. At the same time he also manages to pinpoint a certain aspect or specific influence within the core of each band, and push it to the forefront of production. In this case The Secret sound more of a mix of diy lo-fi crust from the outer reaches of an isolated black metal scene.

The combination of volume, feedback, and guitar creates an almost a droning church organ sound for opener ‘Cross Builder’ and introduces the rest of album in which aesthetically has a lot in common with the blackened side of extreme metal. Solve Et Coagula is a lot noisier than most, giving too much high end to the mix, especially when the screaming and sometimes monotonous vocals of Marco Bertoldini seem to get lost within thick cloud of raw anger. It is definitely heading towards the more black metal side of things that’s for sure, and where the majority of this album really sits.

For those up with their Latin, you would already know that Solve Et Coagula means seperate, and join together (or “dissolve and coagulate”). The Secret have taken apart the broken sectors and divisions of Italian religion, society, and Berlusconi’s glossy governing media brigade, and created an album full of lyrics that speak of what to them is an almost failed state. According to the band on this album, the current situation in Italy isn’t looking good, but hopefully the nadir has been reached. Only their fourth album will be able to tell us.