‘here you go. sorry it took forever.’
So reads the Facebook post that Brendan Sloan made when he shadow dropped his project’s new album on the night of Leap Day (for Americans anyway – it was well into March 1 Down Under). It’s a sentence that says a lot – humility, a tinge of regret and desire to not disappoint, but mostly a tiredness at its core. Though we fans were patient, I’m sure it felt like forever to Sloan who’s the only member of this project. Still, no big, grand statement on release (though there was a more substantial, equally touching and human message sent to loyal Bandcamp followers) and certainly no marketing that I saw leading up to it. The succinctness of it all also, fittingly, encapsulates a lot about the album itself.
convulsing ruptured from the metal underground worldwide with 2018’s Grevious. Though there was a couple projects before that – a split with Siberian Hell Sounds and the debut album Errata – Grevious was the breakout, and goddamn what a breakout it was. Furious and astute, one of those projects that made you do a double take upon learning it was just one guy, gal, or pal doing all the work, wholly impressive even regardless of that fact and ridiculously promising. Though Sloan had been teasing some work on it in past months, perdurance still arrived without a bang or a whimper, but a secret third thing.
That is until you hit play and then all the moments of first hearing convulsing rush back to you with just enough whelm for you to take note. Not long into the album – maybe around the third track “inner oceans” at the latest – it really starts to set in: convulsing‘s back, and then things afterwards stop surprising you. Not because there’s no surprises (there’s several) or that Sloan played it more predictable this time around (he absolutely did not), but because you get the sense early on that perdurance is special, and that no amount of preparation can steel you for the turns and detours taken relative to what you know convulsing as. It’s much more a ‘wow, of course he would do this, it’s a brilliant idea that I didn’t know I needed from him‘ rather than an ‘eh, this doesn’t stand out much to me‘.
Perdurance as a word is basically a synonym for endurance. It’s the will to continue onward, the resolve in us all to varying amounts and degrees, and the way this album captures it is harrowing and darkly accurate. What starts as a sermon of painful existence with “pentarch” spins into a retributive liberation from the poisons and prisons of life on “endurance”. So too does the music itself mirror these two disparate feelings. The hardest and heaviest music is joined by caustic and violent lyrics, and while there’s not much in what I’d call lighthearted music on perdurance, its more atmospheric and sonically calm moments are paired with lyrical glimmers of hope – relatively speaking – or no lyrics at all so as to stew in your mind unabated like a frothy broth.
“inner oceans” got mention earlier as a pivotal moment in the album because it is one. “pentarch” and “flayed” before it feel like a warm welcome back cloaked in the pomp and brood of high-concept death metal. Blast beats, finger-splintering riffs, and a general air of darkness especially mars the first fifth of the album, as you’d expect. “inner oceans” brings down a cosmic hammer to obliterate those more expected elements, forming a new bastion of malaise that’s much more inspired, varied, and, to me, relevant to the themes of the album. It has a more open, pronounced intro to let the music breathe just as there are moments of openness and reprieve from overwhelming mental states. The whole track battles with itself in all ways imaginable, acutely self-aware of damage it’s done to itself as well as the outside forces slamming it into walls to ripple its skin and hear the clatter of bones colliding with a solid surface. And just as it churns itself into an anxious, downcast mess, just after the five-minute mark the intensity ruptures into a new form that could honestly stand as a whole new track. The first verse after this change-up is telling:
‘once more regain myself
re-inhabiting the shell
corpse dredged up from ocean floor
rinsed and ready
to repeat’
The instrumental interlude simply called “-” feels purgative for the first half of the album. While it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows on the back half, the ambient wails and moans of “-” are akin to spirits or souls (demons?) encircling you after being exorcized from within, swallowed up by an ether above. I love it – it is easily the calmest part of the album and that’s great because the next and last three songs demand a lot of you. “gossamer pall” almost seems like a misnomer at first as it implies a light, airy cover for something, but from the first second of the track you’re besieged with some of the densest instrumentation on perdurance. This is one of many parts where the weight of convulsing is very apparent, where you can feel the emotionality placed by Sloan into each note himself. Then “shattered temples” happens and it’s such a clinic on extreme metal, I don’t even know where to really begin. Just prepare for lots of riffs, amazingly realized progression in all its dissonant glory, a false stop that leads to an Altarage-esque eruption, sick anti-authoritarian lyrics, and some of the best melodies on perdurance, if not the greater death metal landscape in a long while.
“endurance” is where the album ends (aside from a bonus track that serves as a sort of epilogue for those who purchased the album on Bandcamp) and it’s easily the most affecting part of the album. A long, arduous ending only because it asks a lot of you for almost 13 minutes. It’s also a wonderful summation of perdurance as a whole, combining well-paced and executed instrumental passages with vocals that really claw at the psyche. It’s here that the story takes a grand turn, sun rays puncturing holes in the blackened cocoon of sorrow and depression. For the first time, for real, there’s a lightness to the music in spots between the driving volleys of drum fills, assaulting guitars, and curdled vocals. The lyrics reason with themselves, musing on the precious good that life has to offer that banish the destitution, even temporarily. The ending is one of the most powerful moments I’ve heard in music for years. The instrumentation falls out to a reverbed serenity of clean tones while Sloan whispers a whole verse to us before we’re smacked again with surgical weight and some of the realest lyrics ever:
‘the eternal promise
revealed in brief kindness
how fragile the beauty
for which to resist all hells
strengthening my resolve
to overcome old pain
cast aside cloak of shadow
and look upon the sun’
This section wears you down for sure, but it’s what comes next that actually broke me for good:
‘the depth of a love
restores me in all moments
how precious you are‘i’ll endure a while longer’
I cried when I first heard this part and read along to the lyrics, if that’s any indication of where my head’s been at for the last few months. It’s so impactful and feeling, especially for something like convulsing to trigger in you. perdurance is masterful with its emotions; yes, you are made to feel the sludgy, scarred heart of its dark metal, but you are also afforded the washing of it to see its true nature, adorned with an alluring texture built from love and the light of life that so often eludes us. And that makes sense – Sloan himself seems very much in tune with his communal spirit, gleefully inviting fans to reach out to him if they wish to know more about the music’s process and purpose. His music sings not only of harsh realities we can relate with, but also of finding the thing(s) that pushes you past them, to see the good in each other, to give yourself and others grace, but also battle injustice directly and with intent, and celebrate the new world you build in doing so. To endure.
I’m brought back to when I first heard The Chemical Mind, and how much their first album Beneath the Shadow It Casts dug deep into me to affect in a way I hadn’t seen music do in years, possibly ever. Each album from then on has been similarly transcendental, a watershed moment for extreme music and whatever year is graced with albums from that project. convulsing is similarly poised – Grevious has been a go-to for angular, challenging death metal since its release, worthy of rekindling thoughts and feelings on it as we look back or revisit it as fans or to share with friends, and, goddamn, this album is somehow even better technically and emotionally. I’m in genuine awe – it really feels like we’ve reached some sort of new pinnacle with perdurance.
I do not say this often at all, but if I had to give this album a score, this would be a very confident 10/10. This is easily, without a doubt, one of the best albums I’ve heard so far this decade. I’m at a point where I question myself – ‘nah, I’m tripping, it can’t be that good. Let me take a break and come back to it in a day or two‘ – only to listen again and be assailed by the tsunami of thoughts and feelings I had the first few times I heard it and the first time I read the lyrics. perdurance is absolutely the real deal and so is convulsing.
What ‘harsh realities’?
Dude has an irl infinite money glitch and an ego that dwarfs Jupiter.