Wednesday 16 March 2016

Torpor/Sonance - "Torpor/Sonance" Split 12inch (Review)

By: Hunter Young

Album Type: Split 12inch
Date Released: 12/02/2016
Label: Truthseeker Music


This is one of the dirtiest albums I've heard outside of a true crust punk manifesto, dripping with greasy crunch, gain for years, and enough aggression to start its own political movement. Torpor hits you with a mountain of solid feedback and heaving riffs, while Sonance give you a lovely cup of tea laced with arsenic and cocaine. These two bands hit you high and low, dragging you behind their vans to scrap all the skin from your body.  In short, this is a monstrous album. It leaves you on the rocks, wracked with the darkness that lives inside your soul and stretched out, naked. It is a venture that you dare not take on lightly. Bring Friends! Share the Misery!

“Torpor/Sonance” Split 12 LP//DD track listing

1). Torpor – Jasager
2). Torpor – Environs
3). Torpor – Agalma
4). Sonance – End of Life
5). Sonance – Under And Under
6). Sonance - Capes

The Review:

Ever just find one of those albums that you know none of your friends will ever appreciate? That is just so heavy, so fundamentally dragging its knuckles so far into the earth it's like twin grand canyon’s?  Well, if not, here's one to pop your cherry: the new 12" (that's right, so massive it had to add an extra 5" to please your mom) split from Torpor and Sonance.

To start with, this is one of the dirtiest albums I've heard outside of a true crust punk manifesto, dripping with greasy crunch, gain for years, and enough aggression to start its own political movement. Torpor hits you with a mountain of solid feedback and heaving riffs, while Sonance give you a lovely cup of tea laced with arsenic and cocaine. These two bands hit you high and low, dragging you behind their vans to scrap all the skin from your body. 

Torpor opens the gates to the Maddened Plains with “Jasager”, a 10 minute marathon to self decimation, and then driving the nails even deeper with “Environs” and “Algama”. Like a few other feedback addicted bands, Torpor simply lets their sound speak much of the time, dragging you across a sonic landscape of glass and grit. With a vocalist who screams from at least the 5th circle of reverb hell, filled with a suffering that I could not humanly imagine, they sink their rusted metal fingers deep into the center of your brain and don't let go for the entirety of the 21+ minutes of side A. Trying to shake them loose is simply going to shred your psyche when they hook you. 

Sonance is just as brutal, screaming for vengeance with a more melancholic tone. They lull you into a false peace with their intro to “End Your Life”, combining some progressive aural brutality with a hardcore vocal styling, dripping with rawness. It's a harrowing endeavour simply to listen.

Absolutely guttural, laden with the screams of tortured instruments and amps, Sonance comes in like an avenging wraith wreathed in nothing but the scraps of burial cloth that were left clinging to it. They attack their guitars as if mortally offended, wrenching tortured harmonies from them before again falling into a quiet beauty.  Sonance lets you breathe instead of constantly grinding you down like Torpor does, levelling you with an emotional freight car. “Over and Under”, track 2 for them, doesn't let up at all, but instead is a swirling maelstrom of inner hatred. It sucks at you like mud on a battlefield, to trap you and suffocate as it closes in on you. They close with “Capes”, a post metal cleansing of the palate. Instrumental, and much needed.

Sonance are like the death of a loved one, a black void in a familiar place. 

In short, this is a monstrous album. It leaves you on the rocks, wracked with the darkness that lives inside your soul and stretched out, naked. It is a venture that you dare not take on lightly. Bring Friends! Share the Misery!


“Torpor/Sonance” is available here



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