Style: avant-garde metal, symphonic metal, avant-garde jazz, “opera” (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Naked City, John Zorn, Mr. Bungle, Diablo Swing Orchestra
Country: United States-NY
Release date: 15 March 2024 but really never1
I will begin my review for La Suspendida with a lengthy aside2. Built on a subculture of transgression against just about every institution the Western world holds sacred, metal often comes across as reactionary at face value. Largely, the metal musician is just putting on an act against authority, embracing their individuality through a defiance of perceived hegemony. Even musically, metal acts against the norm; no other major genre of music uses harsh vocals nor blast beats. Transgression is as central to metal as electric guitar is, and with it comes offense. To listen to metal is to implicitly embrace the hideousness of society and ourselves through music. And to preface the following, I’m neither prudish nor squeamish when it comes to the music I seek out despite lots of it being deeply offensive on purpose.
I observe, though, that the balancing act of being artfully offensive and being a twisted hack is often a tightrope walk. The subculture metal musicians have cultivated since nearly the beginning is one of one-upmanship: who can play faster, be heavier, and flaunt the most gruesome or satanic image. In 1992, Cannibal Corpse released Tomb of the Mutilated, and the cover art is undoubtedly offensive, but it’s just a painting—this is not in particularly poor taste. But three years later, Mayhem released The Dawn of the Black Hearts with a cover featuring the rearranged corpse of band member Dead who had just killed himself—while successful at being more transgressive than Tomb of the Mutilated, it’s difficult to justify the desecration of a corpse for an album cover. Sometimes metal simply goes too far, and I believe that happens when the artist fails to divorce their philosophical musings and art from real life. Black metal albums shouting about burning churches are sick, but actually burning churches goes a teensy bit too far.3
Male metal musicians’ lack of self-awareness (or likely caring) about this distinction has long pushed women away from the metal world. I can think of a dozen death metal songs about brutalizing women, and so few are done with any semblance of art in mind4. Since women have been oppressed by men for so much of history, it would be more transgressive to not be misogynistic; accordingly, it seems like these male musicians are simply showing their true colors, alienating women in a way that is unacceptable and against the spirit of metal.
Avant-garde metal collective La Suspendida tries to flip this narrative, telling a story of feminist empowerment based on the real life story of Carl Tanzler (trigger warning following for those squeamish). Tanzler was a German doctor who hopelessly fell in love with his patient Elene Milagro de Hoyos (María Elena is her nom de plume for La Suspendida), and when she died, he preserved her body and committed obscene acts of necrophilia for years before being discovered. If you think that concept doesn’t sound very feminist, La Suspendida attempts to rewrite the story by sympathizing with Tanzler, exploring the idea that perhaps Elene wanted this ‘relationship.’ The full concept entails that María is in limbo, and she’ll die without consistently receiving seed from the living. She is using Tanzler in a dominatrix fashion—hence the justification it’s sexually empowering for María—but ultimately the argument boils down to “fucking corpses would be ok if you were keeping them semi-alive” which isn’t a compelling reason to sympathize with a real life rapist necrophiliac.5
The story here is clearly an attempt at something potentially interestingly perverted. Let me reiterate: La Suspendida think that turning a story of necrophiliac rape into a woman just begging for sex from her doctor in the afterlife is feminist empowerment—I have no clue how they convinced a woman to sing on this album. It’s a ridiculous thought, but I suppose it could work in the proper context with a wordsmith’s pen to provide thoughtful gothic lyrics to the macabre tale: one cannot avoid invoking Nabakov’s Lolita, in which Nabokov writes from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, a charismatic manipulator who is “in love” with twelve year old Dolores. All of Humbert’s poetry and ambiguity obfuscates his central crime; that he is a pedophile and a rapist—the novel’s genius is to tell such horrors in such innocent tones as to almost fool the reader67. La Suspendida, on the other hand, doesn’t provide such elegant storytelling, instead featuring some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever read courtesy of libretto William Berger. Many will crop up as I discuss the musical contents of La Suspendida, but a couple of particularly egregious lines include “Everyone fucks the dead / You self-righteous prigs” and you don’t even need to look beyond the title of “My Corpse, Your Dungeon.” It’s all tasteless, so devoid of artistry as to completely undermine the project’s point-of-view and render their statements as offensively transgressive—why did they insist on modeling their awful idea for a concept on an already horrific real life story and then have the gall do not even execute the shitty idea well?
Everything else on La Suspendida is offensively bad, too. In the words of my peer Dave, “It’s like if Diablo Swing Orchestra were the worst band in the world.” More than a dozen musicians—and four dancers in the live performance—contributed to the project, and nobody had the wherewithal to think about all the ways this doesn’t work. Featuring such diverse acts as avant-jazz/metal trio Kilter, metal string quartet Seven)Suns (who did a rad cover album of Dillinger’s One of Us is the Killer in 2023), the Growlers Choir, and Folterkammer’s dominatrix soprano Andromeda Anarchia who plays the lead role of María Elena, La Suspendida oozes with talent. That makes the final manifestation of the opera all the more frustrating.
When the tracks aren’t extended drones as in “Limbo – A Place with No Weather” and “Afterglow”—superfluously long in both cases if inarguably the least offensive parts, and prime contributors to an already bloated 80+ minute release—Kilter usually take the lead. Made up of my all time favorite drummer Kenny Grohowski (Imperial Triumphant), bassist Laurent David, and sax player Ed RosenBerg III, the jazzmen set the tone for much of the album, and what a tone it is! As a disclaimer, these three hold B.F.A.’s, a PhD in composition, decades of experience between them, and have studied at some elite music schools internationally, and I haven’t; I have no doubt in their abilities or skills. However, on La Suspendida they use them… for evil. Janky rhythms follow polyrhythms nonsensically, adding complexity where none is needed and actively sabotaging the melodies I’d prefer unmangled in an album purporting to be an opera. My biggest take away from La Suspendida’s instrumental performances, however, is that there’s a reason why I’ve never heard the bass saxophone take the lead on a metal project before. The flatulent honks in jagged rhythms prove grating by the end of overture. The haphazard runs it takes mirror the songwriting, seemingly improvised but painfully so, screeching back and forth with no rhyme or reason as the songs haplessly follow along.
For a pseudo-opera, I’d expect a wicked vocal performance like Andromeda Anarchia had on Folterkammer’s Weibermacht earlier in 2024, flexing inhuman switches between operatic soprano and shriek, but most of her harsh vocals on La Suspendida sound halfhearted with a dearth of her energetic clean vocals. As Elena, Anarchia creaks in “Limbo,” whispers in “Laudes Mortuorum & Roll Call of the Newly Dead,” and obnoxiously enunciates “my corpse, your dungeon, riiiiiiight” in “My Corpse Your Dungeon.” Sometimes, she sounds like a crazy person trying to call a cat (“The Ballad of María Elena”), and at others she conjures up the imagery of a mother performing syncopated ASMR breathing in one’s ear to lull one to sleep (“Lullaby”). Andromeda Anarchia clearly loves the role of dominatrix, though, performing the duty on two different 2024 albums, and her demands of Tanzler on La Suspsendida like “water my dust bowl with your devoted seed” are performed with conviction, at least. The Growlers Choir, on the other hand, do little other than whisper like a gaggle of lovestruck teens by the boys locker room, the five of them contributing very little except a sibilant quality to an already deflated album.
The highlight, bar none, of La Suspendida is quartet Seven)Suns whose experience on projects like their Dilinger cover album and So Hideous’s latest post-black metal masterpiece shines through brightly with intricate counterpoint. Seeing as the boys in Kilter composed the whole thing, one wonders why their counterpoint is so much weaker compared to the sleek chamber approach of the strings. If the bass saxophone were more artfully restrained and employed like the string quartet, it would be less obnoxious—but even then it would sound like one of Seven Impale’s worst cuts. Seven)Suns shreds on “Overture – Death & Transfiguration,” breaks the endless drone with Xenakis-esque pizzicato on “Limbo,” and desperately tries to save the raucous “fuck me louder” track “Double Call – Laudes Mortuorum Reprise and Finale” by supplanting the jazz trio around nine minutes into the track.
Occasionally, you find a pretentious work so terrible as to make you question whether it even qualifies as music. La Suspendida takes the talents of thirteen metal and jazz musicians and ruins them—even my all-time favorite drummer isn’t a saving grace in this mess. The first time I heard the long drone of “Limbo,” I prayed it would end, but eventually I was begging for more to save me from bass sax jazz. A subversive feminist metal opera could be ridiculously awesome, but both text and performance are so abysmal that this hardly qualifies as art. It’s a strange fever dream of misguided sympathy and of obnoxious brass, of soprano snarling and of stitched together rhythms. The sole saving grace is an underutilized string quartet with the rest of the project suffering from horridly misplaced ambition. As a whole, La Suspendida is wildly offensive, disgustingly tasteless, and excessively wasteful in its roster of talent. Were its goal to offend the listener, you could consider La Suspendida a success, because I, for one, am offended by this abomination. Fuck me dead.
Recommended tracks: Overture – Death & Transfiguration; Interlude – Climax
You may also like: Folterkammer, Seven)Suns, Sarmat, Neptunian Maximalism, A.M.E.N., Don Bolo, Don Salsa, Aenaon, Seven Impale
Final verdict: 2/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Silent Pendulum Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
La Suspendida is:
KILTER: Laurent David (bass, composition, production); Ed RosenBerg III (bass saxophone, composition, arranging); Kenny Grohowski (drums, composition)
Maria Elena: Andromeda Anarchia (vocals)
The Choir Of The Dead: GROWLERS CHOIR Pierre-Luc Senécal (creator and leader); Chorists: Marie Claude Fleury, Maude Theberge, Jeff Mott, Samuel Arseneau-Roy, Laurent Bellemare
SEVEN)SUNS: Earl Maneein (violin); Blanca González (violin); Fung Chern Hwei (viola); Jenny DeVore (cello)
LIBRETTO: William Berger
DANCERS: Fanny Coulm, Yutaka Nakata, Antoine Delecroix (sound design), Elodie Letaeron (video)
- Note that this was NOT missed in the traditional sense. I was awaiting its release but Silent Pendulum Records screwed the pooch AGAIN (as they have done regarding release dates before), and this thing seems to have never officially came out, probably per the band’s request (?). It was only released physically it seems, so I bring this review to you from international waters—if you catch my drift. ↩︎
- It will be three-ish paragraphs (Ian, eat your heart out). ↩︎
- Flog me as a poser if you want, I don’t care. ↩︎
- If that topic can be done artistically at all, it would likely be in the form of some Gothic perversion of a relationship archetype. There’s also the approach of being so ridiculously over-the-top it must be tongue-in-cheek, like Infant Annihilator. The edgy humor may not be to one’s taste, but they’re obviously leaning into a bit. ↩︎
- One of the main problems with the concept is its reliance on a non-consensual relationship of a real life event. Had this been completely fictional, while gross, it could have been spun better. Instead, it comes off as a sophomoric attempt at edginess. ↩︎
- And it often does. Many an idiot takes Lolita at face value. “But his love was so pure!” She was twelve and he’s a liar. ↩︎
- My sincerest thank you to my peer Chris for his literary insights here. ↩︎
