Review: Convulsing – Perdurance

Genres: dissonant death metal (mostly harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Ulcerate, Ad Nauseam, Gorguts
Country: Australia
Release date: 1 March 2024

The difference between incredible and terrible dissonant death metal is nearly impossible to tell for the layperson as with most Modern and/or Postmodern art forms. Beyond the style just sounding “wrong” for the unacculturated—after all, it’s dissonant by design—you need some serious technical musical knowledge and experience in similar styles (and preferably a slight philosophical background, too, to really immerse yourself in the significance of dissonance in Western music) to glean anything from dissodeath beyond it just being noise. And admittedly, the difference between “hack” dissodeath and dissodeath from a genuine musical genius is small, but thankfully as a herald of the avant-garde, I pride myself in being able to tell them apart and will happily announce that Convulsing writes amazing dissodeath.

Convulsing is made up of a single entity: Brendan Sloan. His performances across the board really deserve to be highlighted above all else, performing everything—including producing the album—himself. That’s no small feat for any genre, even the simplest pop, but to be talented enough to compose, perform, and produce material as technical and dense as this is nothing short of jaw-dropping—no wonder it took him six years to release this followup to the cult classic Grievous. Across Perdurance, Sloan bellows mid-low roars which complement the instruments well and are my favorite style of harsh vocals—occasionally, he switches to higher, rasping screams which also show off impressive vocal technique and really prevent any monotony. Next, despite a couple suspiciously clean fills, I am pretty sure he’s actually drumming across Perdurance. Not the flashiest performance you’ve ever heard in the genre, his blast beats sound relaxed, though still metronomic, and his parts always fit exactly what the music needs, providing the album with its sense of heaviness. 

Most dazzling of Sloan’s various skills, though, is the masterful string-playing. Wildly creative riffs fill Perdurance until it’s bloated with them: there is no shortage of slinking, slimy string parts where the mutated guitars crawl between headphone channels as if they’re trying to escape their physical bounds. Sufficiently grimy, the tone is immaculate for the style, the shifts into a cleaner tone for solos well-placed to prevent timbral stagnation. The solos are stunning in their own right, exploding forth as rapturously as feverish tech death—think Vale of Pnath, Heaving Earth, or Obscura. The first half of the album, in particular, assaults the listener with nonstop out-of-control chromatic solos, crushing riffs, and bewildering dissonance. “Pentarch” beats you down with chunky death metal and an incessantly pummeling blast beat; “Flayed” skins you alive with heat from the friction of the eerie pick scrapes; and “Inner Oceans” morphs from its warped acoustic intro to an unhinged dissonance like a throat being trampled as guitars and drums lock into a deathly 5/4 groove whilst shimmering chords are interspersed with Meshuggah-esque rhythmic chugging sections. 

After a disappointing, rather bland ambient interlude, “-”, the second half of the album wastes no time into resuming the onslaught, though something feels different.  Like Ulcerate on Stare into Death and Be Still, glimmers of melody start seeping through the wizened exterior of the dissodeath as rather beautiful tremolo riffs pop up every now and then before Convulsing thrusts you back into a hail of chaotic, knotty guitar parts. Over the remaining three song span from “Gossamer Pall” to “Endurance,” Convulsing seamlessly and discreetly shifts modes from Replicant to the sage wisdom and beauty of Dessiderium: the transition is done slowly, first with those cracks of melody and glorious tremolos, but then “Shattered Temples” includes a straight tech death section that shirks off any remaining dissonance after a bit of a silly false ending (the track also has possibly the best riff on the album at around 2:35) until we reach the epic closer “Endurance.” featuring melancholic clean vocals and moments of placid serenity. 

To let his brilliant riffs and songwriting shine, Sloan produces everything himself, undoubtedly taking influence from Dan “Fucking” Swanö. Overall, Perdurance’s production opens the album up, full of rich detail and a noticeably pristine master. Now I’ve made it to the fifth paragraph of the review before mentioning Ad Nauseam, but seeing as they broke the dissodeath meta, nothing will be able to escape comparison to them going forward; they’re especially pertinent as a comparison here because the start of “Inner Oceans” directly homages the intro of “Coincidentia Oppositorum.” Despite how tight Convulsing is, Perdurance lacks the singular focus of Ad Nauseam, suffering from a couple production hiccups—namely an audible moment of Sloan’s phone going off in the recording at the start of “Inner Oceans” (note: this is almost surely intentional to add to an intimate song intro that also includes his breathing, but regardless the choice feels like a blip to an otherwise largely focused album) and that “-” comes off as extremely hollow, poor sound design which I suppose is to be expected for a metal artist and not an ambient one. Besides these minor lapses of focus and a slightly too quiet bass, Perdurance is essentially equal to genre titans like Gorguts, Ulcerate, and Ad Nauseam, but the final product is painfully just shy of perfection, really boiling down to attention to minutiae; all the broad strokes that make a dissodeath album fantastic are here. 

The story within Perdurance is also worth a mention with Sloan penning poetic lyrics for every track but the ambient interlude. They match the musical arc to a tee, starting with “searing heat ceaseless pain” in “Pentarch” and ending with “I’ll endure a while longer” in “Endurance.” It’s a beautiful narrative from painful denial to sage acceptance, that musical transition from Replicant to Dessiderium. Perdurance is a benchmark album for dissodeath in 2024 that even the heathens among us can probably easily recognize as particularly special, and it was well worth the six year wait. Brendan Sloan is one uber-talented individual.

Recommended tracks: Inner Oceans, Flayed, Shattered Temples, Endurance
You may also like: Heaving Earth, Dessiderium, Replicant
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal-Archives page

Label: independent

Convulsing is:
– Brendan Sloan (everything)