Konvent's Puritan Masochism: A Record Review

 Those who love metal music, especially extreme metal, understand something that those who do not simply never will, and that is how a music so immediately dark often reveals a light, even while explicitly challenging it. The idea is similar to horror cinema and literature: that which deals in mayhem often points most vividly to virtue. It’s the law of opposing forces. The dance of irony. The reward of the initiated. If the Devil can appear as an angel of light, perhaps the flip begs possibility for his adversary, as well. Crazier things have happened and will again. Ask the plagued Pharoah.

Konvent is a four-piece hailing from Denmark. After a ridiculously successful demo released in 2017, which shot the band into immediate prominence on the festival circuit, Konvent released their first full-length album, Puritan Masochism, on January 24 via Napalm Records. An initial listen offers one blazingly solid assurance about these ladies: they’re not messing around. Puritan Masochism is a crushing, full-fisted, steel-toed sonic blow to the solar plexus. It’s a massive record with big bass grooves (from Heidi) and murky guitar riffs (from Sara) while minimal percussion (by Julie) slows the pace and anunciates the sludginess of their intended doom. On top of this, Rikke’s deeply spat gutturals crawl over the band’s miasma of thickly wired muck like a stubborn rot that just will not die. It’s really quite beautiful.

The genre here, if you’re a genre-nerd, that Konvent has been slotted into is “death-doom”, a style of doom-metal made more off-putting by death-metal style vocals and themes. Sure. Whatever compartmentalizes your library. But what stands out most about Konvent is their ability to make more of the moment than genre labels allow. Yes, the doom is dense here. Absolutely, the death-y vibes clamber about. But something else is in there as well. There’s something larger than those simplistic elements in these songs that lifts Puritan Masochism above monotony and a checklist of genre tropes. It’s the thing that draws listeners back repeatedly and that will make this record a big conversation piece during Album of the Year debates in December. I believe the key element that Konvent possesses and successfully infuses into their music, the thing that sets them apart and makes this album worth celebrating, is conviction. These ladies seem to have something to say -- and they say it as much in their music as their lyrics. 

Vocalist Rikke has stated that a primary theme in Puritan Masochism is chaos, particularly a striking out against chaos, seeking an antidote to chaos. This theme is evident in the album’s artwork which features a waterfall on the cover and a swirling, whirlpool in the open gatefold. The black-and-white color palette also appears to challenge notions regarding chaos, particularly the idea that life can only exist in binary: totally chaotic or ultimately divine. And this same question lurks in Konvent’s music, bristling about those crushing doom beats and shining like a shaky nimbus around the crowns of shattered debris. These songs feel much more like a stomping march into and against the void rather than a celebration -- or requiem -- of one’s own defeat. Second album track “Trust” is a call against cult behavior, against wagering vulnerability as a currency. “Bridge” exposes the ruse of suicide as a solution. “World of Gone”, with its chorus “tick tock / poison clock”, examines the ethereal weightiness of time. And the closing couplet, two tracks simply titled “Ropes Pt. I” and “Ropes Pt. II”, uses bleak pastoral imagery, in a fashion more typical of black metal, to explore the often barren nature of life’s drudgery. Album opener and title track drone-thumps into this barrage of questions with an indictment against patriarchal systems, one that denies the yin and yang balance of the king requiring a queen. Such a lack of balance, particularly staged in a deceptive power play of monarchy -- “Your safe sense of comfort is as warm as an octopus embrace” -- is itself a bedrock of chaos. We begin with the album with the death of the queen. We end the album with barren landscapes. In between are all the fixtures that may cause us to lose hope. The construction of this record is nothing short of artistry.

So where is the hope mentioned earlier? Where’s the silver lining and the antidotes? Good question. All I can say is that it’s in Konvent’s delivery. It’s in the evidence of their conviction as musicians and women seeking to restore balance to an artform they love. It’s in the slow, methodical, brutal and brash, though ordered telling of their musical narrative. But there is also this, and I don’t mean to sound peacock-ish here. The antidote may be in the listener’s ear. As previously stated, not all viewers see virtue in the dark arts, and not all ears here the rise towards resurrection scratching beneath the dirt. Some only hear the dirt. However, according to Konvent, these dirts will not remain barren long. And with an album as large as Puritan Masochism, I believe these ladies have begun a career that’s promising enough to reveal, in the long run, what's itching to break forth.