I’m In A Coffin – One Final Action

Throughout my life, especially in my early teens, I dealt with truckloads of depression and suicidal thoughts. I’m sure I’m not the only one that has struggled with it before, considering the deaths I’ve had to deal with throughout my life thus far. In the end of it all, after I’ve grown up and realized that the life I was given is beyond decent and not as shitty as I once thought, some things still make me want to bury myself alive six feet under. It’s not even that I want to blow my brains out or hang myself from a skyscraper, I just want to live in a coffin, that simple. I’m In A Coffin is a black metal outfit that grabbed my attention after a friend recommended them to me. Coming from parts unknown in the United States, a silly band name and some of the most unoriginal track titles that I’ve seen in a long time, I’m In A Coffin is less of a joke and more of a realization that depressive/suicidal black metal lives with the heart of an iron giant.

So, what do you get when you listen to I’m In A Coffin’s debut full-length that was released back in 2008? You actually get the feeling that you’ve set up shop inside of a fucking coffin. “One Final Action” is such a very powerful record that can alter the bright mood you might be in or it can assist you in helping others commit suicide in various ways. The down-tempo, nineteen-eighties gloom from the tomb riffs that “Adorable”, (yes, the person goes by that name), produces are the same I would expect to find while I was stalking a graveyard for my next victim. As haunting and creepy as the guitar is, the bass is what sets everything up in perfect alignment. It’s the “icing on the cake” if you will when it comes to instrumental work on “One Final Action”.

“Sad-ist”, the vocalist/bassist for this roller-coaster of an outfit, delivers chords that soar over everything else on this record and some vocal work that will creep you the fuck out. His vocals aren’t your average black metal style, they have more of this feeling that “Sad-ist” is being choked as he screams the lyrics, even sometimes whimpering it sounds like. While he swims in his own self-loathing and depression, you also get the feeling that something is missing from his heart. Concerned for his missing counterpart, “Sad-ist” opens up his chest for you to diagnose what is wrong with him in his lyrics.

My continued existence is worse than death, Yet I still live on. Trying to force apathy upon myself. To replace my depression with numbness. I tell myself that it’s worked…That I don’t feel anything anymore…But deep down, I know that I’ll never. Be anything resembling “positive”. Life is my coffin and it’s time to shut the lid. One final action, And this will all end…One final action and this will all end…One final action…I can’t fight the inevitable…So I embrace it…Embrace suicide…I want to die alone and cold, and hating myself for every moment of hope that I ever had.

So, as the great Georg Christoph Lichtenberg once said:

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.

Forget everything you’ve known and everything you will learn, just know that I’m In A Coffin is something very real, something worth a long, hard stare and something that will make you think twice about depressive/suicidal black metal. Oh, remember, if you need me, I’ll be buried someone in Van Buren, Arkansas, living inside of a coffin.

Official Facebook. Official Metal-Archives. Official Myspace. Official Last.fm. Download the record here.