KONVENT

Barely two years ago, KONVENT released their debut album, "Puritan Masochism", and swiftly established themselves as a band with phenomenal potential. Rooted in death / doom but audibly unconstrained by expectation or formula, the Danes' sound just felt slower and heavier and darker than it had any right to be. Oozing out from cracks in the quartet's barrage of leaden riff was something weird, wonderful and wildly distinctive, and it's that refined sense of otherness that makes "Call Down The Sun" an even more startling piece of underground heaviness.

KONVENT really swing. It's a quality that many extreme metal bands miss, but here it makes all the difference. "Into The Distance" is a ridiculously heavy and disorientating starting point, but this band swing so much that the effect is as blearily psychedelic as it is doom-laden and crushing. As an added bonus, Vocalist Rikke Emilie List has one of the most obscene, animalistic growls available to modern ears: on the grand and grinding "Sand Is King", she scales the scabrous octaves, lost in deathly reverie and in complete, abyssal symbiosis with her bandmates.

On the epic, blackened squall of "In The Soot", KONVENT go even further out, embracing dissonance and mesmeric monotone, while still showing evidence of a strong, if skewed connection to the SABBATH-ian mothership. On "Grains" they let the frostbite set in, across six minutes of brittle, blackened pomp with lysergic undertones, while "Fatamorgana" is a shape-shifting dirge with a restless spirit and echoes of blitzed-out acid rock. "Never Rest" and "Pipe Dreams" are equally gripping variations on the same hallucinatory theme, while the closing "Harena" is simply astonishing: a grotesque, deathly psych-doom odyssey that sounds like it's being belched up from the depths of oblivion in real time.

On the surface, "Call Down The Sun" is merely an excellent death / doom record with a blackened heart and psychoactive properties. But spend enough time with this untamed beast of a record, and it will soon become apparent that there is much genius, even more magic and something else, something deeply sinister and weird, going on here too. KONVENT have it all, and it's beautiful, terrifying and disgustingly fucking heavy. This band should probably rule the world. Or start a cult. Either way, I'm in.