The sheer volume of this album is bound to be a deal-breaker for some listeners; it may even serve to deflect some of the musical variety on offer for those seeking simple guitar rock. Yet for the thoughtful listener there is much to appreciate here. “Saturn,” its opening track,” flutters and screeches, hanging in suspension as any good intro might. “Hypnagog” is the album’s full-scale launch, however, pitched somewhere between the muscular metal of the Melvins and the more orthodox hardcore-punk from which this band is clearly spawned. The hybridity is escalated by the song’s modulating sections, which shift in rhythm and intensity throughout (and revel in acid-laced deviations of noise and lyrics). “End Times” is built on a minor chord guitar dirge and pounding rhythm, each taken from the Black Sabbath playbook, yet juxtaposed by screamed vocals meant more to confront than to articulate. “Gille de Rais,” a song one assumes is about the French hero of the Hundred Years’ War (15th Century), is the closest Conduit comes to modern psychedelic music. Its menacing rhythm gives rise to a thick wall of guitar pedal distortion which skirts the line between post-rock and metal. (The album cover even looks like one by Godspeed! You Black Emperor.) “Parasites” is the closest to straight-up hardcore; yet even here the tension felt in its combination of instruments seems less message-driven, more about the experience. “Zero Days” finishes the LP with a clear almost direct incantation—an oddity in terms of strategy (yet not out of place in the greater context). Shouts of “We cannibalize ourselves!” and “Nature breeds in a vacuum!” seem like surmising statements in what has become, by the end, a visceral expression of the world as it tumbles towards apocalypse. It can be taken as topical—the depressing state of politics; the system as bubonic plague. Yet that would limit the message to politicians and people in power, whereas this seems generally more bleak to me, as if to say: the heart of darkness is an endless well. And if such thoughts make you shudder then be forewarned. Drowning World is not for the faint of heart. But if straight-up truth is your poison then here’s the antidote. – Brian Chidester
