Review Summary: Come together again.
I feel like I’ve been in this position before. New music, old sounds and the crying of
revolution from the legions who vault one-handed onto whatever band wagon comes their way. God forbid that something should maybe come along and tick all the right boxes, stand out from the crowds of emulators and somehow achieve some measure of
innovation. We wouldn’t believe it even if it happened. A little boy cried
wolf a thousand too many times for the masses to take this call seriously. We can’t believe it even if it happened.
Convergence in this matter, is at least the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
That is to say that Miscreance’s
Convergence has at least the teeth if not the innovation to pass in today’s musical scenes. But that’s not what “sells”
Convergence as an album, nor is it the album’s main staying point in relevance. What’s made clear, even as the introductory “Flame of Consciousness” noodles into being, is that Miscreance worships a guitar-centric, riff-focused album, emulating a more technical style while approaching a completely wholesome approach to modernising old-school death metal. Maybe that’s a stretch, but these days the technical death metal genre is chock-full of angular tales of dissonant weirdness
ad nauseam with a new wave of taking the humble riff and twisting it until the hurt feels normal again (that’s a bit dramatic bruh).
Convergence’s take is more humble, repetitive and circular. That sounds pretty natural right? Or at least more natural than throwing spaghetti riffs at the nearest wall of confetti and waiting to see exactly what sticks. Maybe the wolf in sheep’s clothing was in fact a wolf. They’re just guarding a different flock.
Closer to home, “Fall Apart” and “Incubo” are a guitarist’s dream, chock full of riffs that take moral restraint and throw them far out the window. But the fact is that
Convergence takes what everybody wants and re-rationalises these ideas into a motion, mastering the basics and making them sound natural. More than what they are: a ***ing good time. There’s the crux. While Miscreance does all the important things right, there’s an air that the neanderthal riff crawl of “No Empathy“, “The Garden” and bellower “Alchemy” have more to offer than crazy riff salads and hoarse growls that make you want to reach for the nearest throat lozenge.
For reasons not quite known to me, my favourite cuts from
Convergence come from the album’s deeper, later cuts. “My Internment” snakes its way through repeated riff melodies and robotic-ish vocals that are bridged by some of the tastiest noodle bass lines this side of 2022. Short chords ring out over a tapestry of feel-good death metal aesthetics, not overwrought in complications before traipsing into some really sweet melody tones a la “Requiem for Sanity”. Talk about a really sweet way to end a proficiently brutal album.
Admittedly, I do like this record, but there’s something holding it back. Even when
Convergence does take a jagged, angular direction its movements become immediately circular, repeating on a particular motif before moving on once again. Perhaps the balance isn’t quite right—a malformation of ideas not quite technically tenacious as the peer group I’ve been comparing it to, nor does this album just groove and get on with it. The brief running time of thirty-two minutes does save on the monotony (to which there is almost none), but I can’t help question as to how much more they can offer if they gave themselves both the breathing room and opportunity to range past the riffs and meat of the not-so-humble death metal genre itself. Looking further abounds it’s clear that metal has reached some sort of unspoken impasse. The listening community, so ready to break away from the norm, doesn’t want to break away from what they know. Sure, innovation is still one of those grey area terms, only gifted to those few premiere acts that break the foundation and shatter boundaries and yet,
Convergence is still nestled in the between of
somewhere, not quite pigeon-holed by the genre tags it so freely represents. Putting all that aside, Miscreance does have what it takes to be lauded on the international stage, assuming enough of the international stage has the ears to hear it.
