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
