SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: SIAMESE – DISSOLUTION

SIAMESE 
DISSOLUTION 
LONG BRANCH RECORDS 

Siamese has come swinging with a new album this month, dissolution. However, with this new record comes a new form of emotional bravery: one that feels like someone sitting in the midnight afterglow of the moonlight, and in that moment, one is going through the motions of breaking apart, rebuilding, and the quiet yet painful evolution of becoming something new. Within this album, the emotions are still raw, the air is electrically charged, the little psychological foreground one has left is unsteady, and one stares at the broken mirror fragments of one’s life in that room. While Siamese has always written from the soul, dissolution is coming from another place entirely. Born from the fractures of time, the departure of a key songwriter, the collapse of musical familiarity, and a deep dive into Mirza Radonjica’s personal past, dissolution is an album about letting that emotional process split them open; it’s about letting these emotions and the journey change them. The result is something candid and vulnerable, where it’s not just writing about the dissolution, it’s documenting the struggle of it all in real time.

From the start, Siamese’s new sound on dissolution is sharpened by loss, rebuilding, and the intention to explore and learn from the emotional wreckage that brought them here. While the band has always had this shiny, crystallized melody and metallic body to their songs, the evolution of that sound is especially potent in the opening tracks, “dark,” “drown,” and “sense.” From the start, the electric, anxiety-ridden shimmers of these tracks drape over deep and truthful guitar cuts like soft silk covering the scars underneath it all. The gorgeous and vulnerable vocal and instrumental melodies serve as the mold that holds all these aggressive, nightmarish textures together, while the instruments embody the anger and frustration that Radonjica tries to hold back from overtaking him. It’s a battle that becomes apparent in these tracks and is one that continues for the rest of the album.

Such larger, bruised, more refined textures continue to carve themselves through in upcoming tracks, “alone,” “friends,” and “sinner.” Not only are these musical risks larger than anything that they have ever accomplished on any of their records up to this point, but these next moments feel like Siamese is literally fighting for something bigger than themselves: their identity, their evolution, and the desire to be bigger than what they originally saw themselves at the start of this whole journey. Especially on tracks like “friends” and “sinner,” it reveals the inner workings of one’s skeletons, the desire for fresh wounds to calcify, and the refusal to stay small in the face of the trials and tribulations life often brings.

“dissolution,” “patterns,” and “nevermore” are where the emotional core of the album tends to shift and become more personal; where the title track “dissolution” becomes the thesis of what this album is representing: What happens when one keeps attempting to outrun something they can not outrun? Coming from the perspective of a son writing to a father he can’t outrun, one can feel the emotional weight of these tracks become almost elephantine, with the responsibility of carrying all of that and what it does to someone psychologically. It’s a circle of memories of his late father – a man who was shaped by his inner demons, violence, and a slew of contradictions. Yet this person hurt him; he also loved him, and that here lies the battle of duality and trauma that has shaped dissolution’s lyrical pulse. Radonjica’s anger, grief, and longing are all coming from an honest place, and sometimes that is what hurts the most. These are not memories shrouded in artistic metaphors; these memories are real scars, naked and exposed.

The album ends with “reveries featuring Caskets,” “reaper,” and “twisted.” An album that swells with deceptively bright melodies as its cinematic and abrasive textures further drag one down into this claustrophobic nightmare, these last tracks only further extenuate what Siamese has built musically on this album. A heavy and beautiful piece of art that is brutal and unflinchingly honest, “reaper” all the way up to “twisted” closes the record, like a door slamming on a version of oneself that one doesn’t want to return to, but there is this aching uncertainty that no matter how many times one tries to bolt that door shut, somehow, someway, it always reopens, and when it eventually does, how will they deal with it then? Every track feels like a different angle of the same bleeding wound: one that keeps healing over and then opening up again. dissolution is not just about rehashing cauterized pain. It’s about no matter how painful, owning those scars, taking the things that caused you great pain – the violence, abandonment, and the silence, even the love, and deciding what one wants to keep close, and what one is ready to let go and not define them anymore. Healing is never this triumphant battle that we read about in fairytales. It’s often messy and deeply painful. Some days we rise above it, some days it pulls us under, and maybe some days it’s a bit of both. That’s what makes this new sound of Siamese resonant. It’s real life, told by someone who has been through it.

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