(We present DGR‘s review of a new album from the Australian one-person band Convulsing, which was released this past March.)
If we can offer a bit of advice – armchair psychiatrists that we are around here – do not let anyone ever tell you that you’re going to have a good time with Convulsing‘s third album Perdurance.
Perdurance is not a ‘good times, happy fun times’ album. It’s a dissonant and ugly piece of work, one that is abrasive enough to smooth barnacles off of a ship. Perdurance is cavernous and noisey, Perdurance is expansive and heavy, but under no circumstances could you look at the bent contortions of Convulsing‘s third album and think to yourself ‘well, that’ll be a pleasant trip through the void’.
Anyone with experience with Convulsing‘s previous two releases – despite the six-year gap between Perdurance and its predecessor Grevious, or the split with Siberian Hell Sounds – could’ve told you this. Project owner Brendan Sloan doesn’t deal in a musical form of ‘nice’. Instead he’s aligned with Australia’s grander dissonant death metal scene, allowing every guitar strum to echo across the middle expanse of the country so that it can reach cities on the other coastlines. In addition to a continued – and appreciated – Porcupine Tree fandom, however, Convulsing does still manage to have its fair share of surprises on Perdurance, and it results in an album that although it often crushes its listeners in misery and noise in about equal measure, manages to progress things forward past just being a melancholic rumble.
Albums like Perdurance are always hard reviews simply because there’s nothing resembling a straightforward ‘single’ that you can point people to. The songs on Perdurance are just as much compositions about atmosphere as they are about rattling the listener’s nerves. They’re long-form ideas being dredged up and then dragged right back into the mud for an experience equally bizarre and ugly. The album is meant to be challenging and at times overwhelming.
It’s why even those who might’ve had some familiarity with the suffocating aura of Grevous prior to this one might still be taken aback by the torturous thunder of “Pentarch” as it opens the city gates into Convulsing‘s wider world. The song is jarring and brutal in how jagged it is, with rhythms essentially impaled upon the overall spike of the song to construct a creature awash in dissonance, enough so that even though you might be staring directly at it, it might still seem to be moving within a world of TV static.
Given that Perdurance is meant to be a challenge and is abrasive at all directions of approach, there’re still songs that manage to surprise and offer some clever twists and turns throughout. Much of the material that Convulsing has assembled here is a howling monster collective; there are many moments in this album where you could imagine vocalist Brendan Sloan in an empty room just recording his screams as they bounce off of concrete walls. Yet, there’s still some hefty weight thrown around within Perdurance as well, with songs like “Gossamer Pill” and “Shattered Temples” hitting aggressively hard.
While Convulsing‘s music takes many a high-frequency white noise-bath throughout Perdurance, the band cut through those songs like a sharpened sword. Sometimes, they even channel Mithridatum‘s talent for burying multiple mind-bending rhythm and guitar lines throughout songs, like ever-coiling snakes, as they (to mix our metaphors) add another brick to the musical wall that they cause to crash down at the end of each song.
Perdurance is a difficult listen but don’t conflate that as being ‘bad’. Perdurance‘s challenge is partially to see how much you can endure but also to maybe gain an appreciation for just how surprisingly well the album’s artwork matches the material within – or vice versa. It crafts bizarre worlds that have roots within death metal but don’t entirely give themselves over to all of that genre’s trappings. It absorbs and mutates and on the other side spits out a creature that may be vaguely recognizable as something terrestrial but isn’t all the way there. It is just as interesting to dissect Perdurance and attempt to discern see what makes all of its fifty-plus minutes tick, as it seems the gears themselves sometimes don’t quite line up. Other times, they’ll be perfectly in sync but only in service of turning the album into a smelting furnace.
Convulsing has a dastardly weapon of an album here, one that grows on you like a fungus, and even though you’ll often stumble in trying to pick out particular segments to explain why the album has its many-pronged hooks in you, you can’t help but want to spread it to other people to see how they take the experience.
And yes, the bonus cover of Porcupine Tree‘s “A Smart Kid” is pretty good too. Runs in a similar vein to their previous covers of “Sleep Of No Dreaming” and “The Sky Moves Sideways”. You start with strong material and you’ll find a gratuitous amount of room to artistically move around in. Convulsing just happens to enjoy taking those songs and making them more ‘hopeless’ than ‘melancholic’.
https://convulsing.bandcamp.com/album/perdurance
https://www.facebook.com/convulsing/
https://www.facebook.com/brndnsloan