A bleak, mournful acoustic strum invites us in to the third Conjurer album, Unself, perhaps evading our expectations for the band. That is until a crashing riff breaks the slumber and anyone who has listened to the previous two releases will recognise that heavy despair that emanates from this bands music. Conjurer are back, but this time they are heavier than ever.
Rather than going down more accessible routes, Conjurer have this time embraced the darker aspects of their music in what is at times an unsettling listen. ‘All Apart’ uses a quiet/loud approach which sounds utterly devastating. A dynamic which permeates through the entire album.
‘There Is No Warmth’ is unforgiving, taking time to move through sludgier terrain to more progressive moments. The vocal delivery is particularly impressive, and a clean production allowing for the nuances to seep through. As the song bleeds into the blackened ‘The Searing Glow’, there isn’t much hope of a respite, and rightly so. Conjurer are here to rip your ears off.
The acoustic ‘The Plea’ provides breathing space as it displaces you from the maelstrom. Its lightness allowing for a recalibration of the senses until ‘Let Us Live’ slowly builds into a climactic epic. It’s Sturm und Drang masked in black metal of the most powerful type, alluding once again to the quiet/loud dynamic introduced earlier. It’s so overpowering and enveloping of the senses that before you don’t even realise you have moved on to the next song, ‘Hang Them In Your Head’. This is the aural equivalent of bleak, sorrowful artworks depicting stormy landscapes.
As if all this isn’t enough, ‘Foreclosure’ unleashes the depths of hell on to you in a final blackened moment of torment. It’s an harrowing penultimate end to the album, which can only be followed in the way it started with another acoustic reverie, ‘This World Is Not My Home’, to see us out. Even this explodes into a triumphal ode to despair in this loudest way possible, with its clean vocals proving stark contrast against the blackened screams.
By going deeper into their sound, Conjurer have taken the elements which made their first two albums so undeniably great, and formulated an ever bleaker sound. It’s an album which begs for repeated listens to understand its nuances but once its secrets are unlocked you are faced with one of the best metal releases this year. Conjurer continue to make a claim for one of the best UK metal bands around at this moment in time.
