Review Summary: A glorious, liberated, spastic heap
Realistically, there’s only so much extreme metal you can play. The genre confines are typically ridiculously rigid, and soon enough you end up eating your own tail. At that point, you have a few outs. The first one is to pretend that everything is okay and soldier on, with the decline in the quality of your releases tightly correlated to your craftsmanship. The second one is to shake things up a notch, keeping you artistically motivated at the risk of alienating your fan base. The third is to break up. Convulse picked path two on their sophomore album, and as many other death metal bands around that time frame found path two merging into path three soon thereafter. And, as many other death metal bands from around that time frame, they reunited a few years ago.
Evil Prevails, the inevitable comeback album, saw the band begrudgingly return to their death roots, keeping it relatively tame and predictable. The guys felt rather detached from the material at hand, and the only time that the delivery seemed to pick up was during the groovier sections that strayed from the template. It was obvious that Convulse was being eaten on the inside by the desire to play something else than what their fan base demanded of them, and when Evil Prevails got a lukewarm reception they took it as a sign to do whatever the hell they desired and set sail for experimental waters, yet again.
Cycle of Revenge tries out what feels like every last thing the band could have ever wanted to try out. Eastern melodies. Folksy influences. Free-form jamming. Thick, groovy riffs. A black metal ballad with throaty, Diatribe-era Wings singing. Soft electronic textures. Fat, tribal-sounding tom beats. A simple guitar etude with ferocious, breakneck drumming in the background. Growls. Whispers. Whispered growls. The list goes on, really. As you can imagine, the record ends up being a horribly incoherent mess as Convulse rips expectations away so hard that they explode all over the room. The final tally of covered ground ends up being a smidgen too high for an album that’s meant to be taken seriously.
On top of that, some of the elements just don’t work, as Convulse stems from a laser precision death metal background and ends up making some of the aural escapades sound rather stiff and unnatural. The loose jamming is by far the worst offender, and the most unfortunate instance of that happens right at the end of the disc. The drummer attempts to fluidly weave fills around a basic, harshly click-tracked guitar ostinato, but ends up making it sound like his drum kit is falling apart, a claim further backed up by his mysterious mid-phrase disappearance that leaves a rather unbearable “Wait, that’s it?” aftertaste for the whole album. Things go even further south when the guitar tries to join in – the solo to “Fractured Pieces” quickly degenerates into Amateur Hour at a blues dad convention, cementing the song and its trite, overextended Arabic groove as the worst clunker on the record.
However, when the pieces fall into place, the results are nothing short of breath taking. Cycle of Revenge is front-loaded with the nuggets, with the title track being a delightful display of slightly modernised 90s melodic Finnish death metal at its finest. The band can do no wrong on that song – the hyperactive drumming in the clean bridge actually works, the lead melody’s timbre is just reminiscent enough of an actual folk performance, and a bombastic solo fittingly wraps the thing up. Things manage to get even better on “God is You”, with the intricate tremolo rhythm slicing up the opening chords getting picked up by the rest of the band and forming the basis of the manic genre-transcending interplay. The three minutes fly by in no time at all. This is Convulse’s new mission statement incarnate.
Whilst it is far from perfection, Cycle of Revenge is an enjoyable record with lots of promise and potential. It should be viewed as a transition album, a sign of what’s to come as the guys iron out the frenzied stylistic hops and make the fluid jamming actually sound fluid. When it works, it really works. And when it doesn’t work, there’s still that ham-fisted aura of experimental death metal along with a distinct vibe of the guys being very much alive and enjoying themselves, making for a pleasant contrast when compared to their comeback album. We haven’t gotten a record with this sort of feel in years, and I for one am eagerly awaiting a more refined follow-up.
