Style: Mathcore, avant-garde metal, industrial rock (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Marilyn Manson, iwrestledabearonce, Frontierer, new Ulver
Country: Virginia, United States
Release date: 15 January 2025
We’ve got a lot to get into here, so I’m gonna keep this intro brief: sometimes an album is so bad and cheesy that it fills you with joy, like an aural equivalent of The Room (e.g., Kaosis’ We Are the Future). Other times, the Bad Music Lottery is much less kind and delivers upon you an experience which makes you feel worse off for hearing it—The Conjuration’s The Trip is unfortunately the latter, a two and a half hour deluge of anger, homage, and brain-searing chaos. Let’s discuss.
The Trip is, frankly, unlike anything I’ve heard before. Yes, all of the elements on their own are redolent of specific influences, whether it be the Frontierer-flavored mathcore that abruptly cuts through the opening voiceover, the manic iwrestledabearonce-style scattershot songwriting across virtually every track, or the industrial electronic moments that vacillate between edgy Marilyn Manson homages and the worst modern Ulver B-side you’ve ever heard. Even the bevy of zany manic vocals and spoken word sections have been attempted by the likes of The World is Quiet Here, Cheeto’s Magazine, and Blake Hobson in the past. What makes The Trip unique, though, is how all these elements are brought together in a tumultuous whirlpool of raw frustration and fervence through anguished lyricism and ferocious discordance. The end result is a primordial soup constantly bubbling and rearranging its organic compounds to articulate multi-instrumentalist Corey Jason Cochran’s myriad fury at the world.
Don’t mistake this editorializing of The Trip’s vexation as a compliment, though: I’ve never heard anything like this album before because it’s a terrible idea, a release thrown together with such abandon that it is truly and utterly unlistenable. Part of what makes Frontierer compelling despite their loudness and chaos, for example, is their ability to repeat and evolve a singular rhythm instead of pasting together their shrill explosive intensity haphazardly, a feat which The Trip fails to accomplish in any of its hundreds of musical passages. And this is coming from the Subway’s biggest Car Bomb fan!1
Compounding the songwriting woes is that almost none of the passages that are being unceremoniously strung together are memorable or even enjoyable, whether they are ruined by grating vocal performances (“The Burning Moon”, “fucknuckle and Tendon”, “The Madness of Melanie Rose”), annoying voice over sections (“Mandata”, “Trip”, the hopelessly long spoken word skit in “at the table {stomp | punk}”), or plodding nothing-burger doom riffage in the absence of insane mathcore (“Call of the Void”).
When throwing a 150-minute album together, there is bound to be at least a couple of good ideas, and indeed, The Trip does have moments that are listenable and some even creep towards a semblance of fun: “fucknuckle and Tendon” intermixes jazz fusion and death metal in a quirky way; the relatively pleasant soft alt-rock moments of “A.D. (Manson Medley)” are a welcome reprieve; and the decent Meshuggah-style guitar solo and prominent bass of “Lorelei” had my ears perked for a moment. It’s all a moot point, though, because by the time I’ve gotten to these parts, I’ve been endlessly fed two and a half hours of featureless unlistenable slop, burdened with the task of creating patterns to distinguish the differences between each plate in my head. As a consequence, any cordial feelings I may have for The Trip’s comparatively agreeable sections have withered into an apathetic husk.
When I review an album, I like to try and understand the point of view of the artist and assess how well the execution reads to me, and in this case, The Trip comes less with a point of view and more with a psychological profile. The lyrics at any given time detail either struggles in The Conjuration’s life or frustrated musings on any number of topics done in a way that feels both juvenile and completely off the top of the head. While I don’t fault The Conjuration at all for writing about his insecurities, personal experience, and hardship, his social commentary is bottom of the barrel at best: some particularly striking offenders are the painfully surface-level callouts of societal issues on “Wrong Time” (‘How can you not see it? / There’s so much going on… / Agenda, symbolism, diversion / Media manipulation, public school subversion’) or the one-two punch of unbearable cringe on “Trip”, first hitting us with lines like ‘They say “Eat the bugs, live in the pod” / No rich asshole will ever be my god / Wanna dictate my life? Better get caskets for two / Cuz you know fighting back is what Americans do’ followed by the eyeroll-inducing ‘Must I kill everyone you love / To finally make you / Raise a fucking brow? / Just kiddin’ / Ain’t nuttin but music ;)’. I would like to say he isn’t technically wrong, but truthfully, I don’t even know what point he’s trying to get across half the time, partially because the commentary is so vague and partially because the lyricism is so horrifically unhinged.2
Perhaps I would be more forgiving of The Trip were it pared down a considerable degree. In its current form, though, I can barely make it a tenth of the way through the album without starting to feel a negative psychological impact. Instead of articulating my thoughts in an organized manner, I’m just going to present to you a curated excerpt of my notes for The Trip so you can witness the decay of my wellbeing in real-time:
- Extremely abrupt opening with voice over
- No sense of cohesion, whiplashes from intense BTBAM part to voice over to intense part
- Annoying song. The reversed drums go on for way too long and repetitive. This could have been an email.
- More BAD ULVER IT’S ALL BAD ULVER
- I’m being punished with walls of unrelated ideas
- I’m starting to miss the aggressive nothing mathcore, it’s so much more listenable than the slow-paced nothing doom metal
- Is my brain addled with ADHD at the hands of social media or does this album have anti-memetic properties that are actively repelling my brain from processing it?
- Track begins with deathcore hell Christmas music
- Semblance of decent keyboard ideas, but at this point, who gives a fuck?
Every moment of The Trip points me to a singular question: who is art for? Of course, there is the obvious surface-level discussion of ‘if you’re a fan of X then you’ll love Y’ or ‘this is a great listen for people who enjoy Z lyricism’, but more fundamentally, the artist virtually always has a specific idea of who they are relaying their message to, and in the case of The Trip, the art is most likely meant for none other than The Conjuration himself. Devin Townsend, for example, has taken this approach many times in his art: Devin has described the songwriting process of Strapping Young Lad’s Alien as ‘toxic’ and ‘psychologically very unhealthy’ but also necessary as a means to get through a turbulent mental state, as it required him to go to extremes that were cathartic but ultimately unhealthy. In a similar vein, Devin Townsend Project’s Deconstruction, particularly the title track, is such a maelstrom of ideas that it comes across more as a canvas for Devin to purge thoughts that simply won’t leave his mind than it does his next acclaimed masterpiece. It’s great if others happen to like it, but in the end, the appeal of a wider audience’s sensibilities is wholly secondary to the actual creation of the art itself. At first blush, this may seem selfish and onanistic as a songwriting goal, but more likely, this approach is born out of necessity: art is ultimately a cathartic process for the artist and its validity is not contingent upon things like cohesive song structures, reining in relentless chaos, or tactful lyricism.
Frankly, I feel worse off having listened to The Trip: it is excessively long, frustratingly unfocused, and comes from a point of view that furiously grates against my sensibilities. On the other hand, The Trip’s scattershot musical ideas, frenetic stream-of-consciousness lyricism about Cochran’s feelings and sentiments, and willingness to let the project balloon into a two and a half hour opus all point towards the idea that in the end, The Trip was created for The Conjuration and The Conjuration alone. You can come along for The Trip if you want, but there was never any intention to save a seat for you. While I hope that The Conjuration comes out the other side of his struggles better off, I personally will not be booking a second ride, because this Trip is not a Trip for me, nor was it ever meant for me, and in the end, I’m okay with that.
Recommended tracks: fucknuckle and Tendon, Lorelei, A.D. (Manson Medley)
You may also like: Nuclear Dudes, Others by No One, The World is Quiet Here, uneXpect
Final verdict: 1/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Label: Independent
The Conjuration is:
– Corey Jason Cochran (vocals, guitars, bass)
– Lauren Myers (vocals)
– Liam Myers (vocals)
– Brandon Turner (vocals)
– Ashley Davis (vocals)
– Cody Shaffer (jaw harp)
- I have been informed by my co-writer Justin that I am actually the Subway’s second-biggest Car Bomb fan behind him, but my point still stands. ↩︎
- Don’t even get me started on the lyrics to “Another Corpse for the Brothel”—that track is particularly vile even in the context of the violent and chaotic lyricism to be found elsewhere on The Trip. Worst of all, it feels like a complete waste, coming across as nothing more than a cheap attempt at shock value through unnecessarily disgusting, gory, and scummy imagery. Seriously, fuck this song. ↩︎
