Conjurer
Unself
Nuclear Blast
In the current world, it’s increasingly difficult to be different, to be yourself, to be true and real. Yet, musically and on a personal level, Conjurer have always been reliably all of these things, and this individuality means that they can share a stage with both the death metal of Carcass and the experimental electro rap of Clipping without missing a beat. Can you name me any other band that can do that? I’ll be waiting a while, I’m sure. Indeed, on the opening acoustic lament of Unself, the first lyric is, “this world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” Conjurer are the square peg in the round hole and gloriously so. The album’s slow-burning intro breaks into the wrought ‘All Apart’, a track that alternates between melancholic post and death metal in a very technical way with bursts of melody. You can tell this is a band that have toured with Gojira.
Their sonic palette is wide, but their attack is as heavy as a winter fuel bill. What Conjurer does exceptionally well is contrast and juxtaposition; even their two-pronged vocal attack is full of contrast between hearty bellows and feral screech. On ‘There Is No Warmth’, the shift between all our aggression into delicate and tender and back again is their ace card. Another element of the band that is particularly satisfying is their attention to tonality and texture as well as musicality, which shapes the general atmosphere of the record as something far cleverer than standard moshpit pleasing fodder. However, they do pit killing with the best of them, like on the bloodthirsty initial assault of ‘The Searing Glow’, but even here they take you to the edge of the cliff then pull you back into an introspective middle eight before pummeling you to the finish. Recent singles ‘Let Us Live’ is a vitriolic, well-timed call to arms that surges into the giant discordant riffing of Hang Them In Your Head and provides a seismic body blow before ‘Foreclosure’ hits you even harder in slow motion.
This is an album that is packed with reality and meaning, and it marks another step up for a band that has never compromised one iota. The production by Joe Clayton is predictably excellent in its execution and adds more weight to my thoughts that Joe is the closest the UK has to an Albini level engineer. As the dying moments of the album echo out with an impassioned final cry, you’re left feeling as though you’ve heard a band truly bare their soul in the realest possible sense. In summary, Conjurer are about as honest and true as it gets.
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Reviewed By George Miller