ALBUM REVIEW: Call Down The Sun – Konvent

Danish blackened death-doom outfit KONVENT rightly set the underground aflame with their debut Puritan Masochism. Blending glacial tempos with guttural roars and riffs heavier than a neutron star, it showed a band with a penchant for writing crushing songs that were not only heavy – even by the genre’s standards – but had memorable moments, too. On their second album Call Down The Sun, they’ve refined this sound further, doubling down on the heaviness and intensity. 

True to their namesake, Into The Distance opens with the tolling of church bells, a prelude to rolling drums and deep, bestial growls from vocalist Rikke Emilie List. The shifting guitars ensure the plodding pace doesn’t grow too stale, with plenty of variation in the riffs that are displayed throughout. It picks up right towards the end, gathering steam as if to physically demolish any eardrums it’s blasted into. Sand Is King screeches into being five minutes later with a rasping scream and once more bludgeoning guitar and drums, the bass rumbling beneath like the shifting of tectonic plates. It channels their penchant for blackened moods amidst its death-doom assault that veers heavily into crushing death metal. 

Similarly, lead single Grains is a merciless hammering, its blackened lead guitars somewhat catchy, even amidst the pummelling it delivers, while Fatamorgana serves up a minimalist bass intro that evolves into monolithic riffs amid its funeral dirge. KONVENT offer no respite throughout Call Down The Sun; Interlude is deeply unsettling, fusing industrial elements into its threatening soundscapes, and closer Harena is a seven-minute journey of near-epic proportions. Its opening lead is suitably grandiose, conjuring wide expanses of desert baking under a descending sun. 

The mood is, perhaps predictably, pitch black throughout the album. What Call Down The Sun lacks in sonic variety, it more than makes up for it in the subtle ways each song sits apart from the other. While it’s all unrelenting and punishingly heavy, the aforementioned Harena flirts with traditional heavy metal in its opening guitar work before descending once more into the pits of despair, while Never Rest has cascading drum fills interspersing the riffs that fall like huge slabs of granite. 

Ordinarily, a more spacious production allows each instrument to shine, the intricacies of the parts to come through and be better appreciated. Here, however, the production is suffocating and Call Down The Sun is all the better for it. Such pitch black, apocalyptic noise needs to feel oppressive, like there’s no light left in the world and KONVENT achieve that with ease. The desolate fury that inhabits Call Down The Sun is relentless, the tone is disturbing, heavy and doom-laden to the extreme; it shows a band that have taken the two years since Puritan Masochism to explore the depths, rather than the breadth, of their sound, and that have come back from the enforced years away thanks to the pandemic more pissed off and hungering than ever. 

Rating: 8/10

Call Down The Sun is set for release on March 11th via Napalm Records.

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