Band:	Konvent
Album:	Call Down The Sun
Style:	Death doom metal
Release date:	March 2022

01. Into The Distance
02. Sand Is King
03. In The Soot
04. Grains
05. Fatamorgana
06. Interlude
07. Never Rest
08. Pipe Dreams
09. Harena

Sometimes I read what other people are saying about an album and wonder how we possibly listened to the same thing.

Denmark’s Konvent made their debut back in 2020, but had already built up quite a bit of hype before then. It’s not really for originality, since they play a fairly rudimentary form of death/doom that is more on the accessible side of the genre, at least in terms of structure. Still, they play it in a pretty emphatic manner; 2020’s Puritan Masochism opened in style with the title track, a certifiable banger of a track that hit hard with solid hooks and a dense low end. Beyond that song, there was a bit too much trudging and a bit too little inspiration or innovation to keep me coming back to the rest of the record, but it put Konvent on my radar, and I was intrigued to see where they went next.

Two years later, Call Down The Sun is the band’s chance to expand musically, and to a certain degree they have. There’s been no stylistic revolution; “Into The Distance” is as slow, trudging and heavy as one would expect from the debut. However, there is a bit of a blackened tinge to some of the instrumentation here, such as on “Grains”, and it works nicely. What also works nicely is the more melancholic tone that seeps into tracks such as “Fatamorgana” and “Harena”; the former of these makes good use of some gang vocals, while the latter deftly incorporates some tasteful violin to accentuate the sadder tone. In general, it feels like the songwriting has been taken up a notch; the riffs are still solid and the drums add a strong atmosphere to the songs, but the tracks branch out enough to sustain interest more readily than they did on Puritan Masochism. With all these complimentary words, why’s the score so low, I hear you ask? It really comes down to one thing: the vocals.

Lead vocalist Rikke Emilie List uses a mixture of higher-pitched shrieks and deeper gutturals. On the debut album, or at least the title track from it that I’ve been going back to, I enjoyed her vocals, and our review of the album suggests I’m not the only one. However, whilst the shrieks still sound very solid when they appear on the album, I genuinely struggle to handle the growls this time around. They sound really strained and awkward; it hits worst for me early on in “Grains” and “Never Rest”, but it’s a persistent problem for me throughout the album. The thing is, it wouldn’t detract so much if they weren’t so front-and-center in the mix, but they dominate the sound so much that it’s hard to overlook them.

I fear I may be in a minority here; as indicated in the opening sentence, I looked up reviews of this album elsewhere while writing this review to see if this was a prevailing opinion, and the first one I opened genuinely said that the vocals were what made this band stand out, and the reviewer had, in 40 years, never heard a vocalist like this. Given that the emphasis of this statement meant it in a positive manner, I don’t know what I’m missing here, but with every repeat listen the growls have become more and more grating to me, to the point where it really overshadows the positivity I feel towards the other components of the album.

It's a shame, really; I don’t like bashing one element of a band, and I do think that List’s higher-pitched vocals sound pretty great, but it ultimately really held me back from enjoying this album as much as I expected to. If the instrumental side of Konvent continues on the positive trajectory they’re on and things click better on the vocal side next time out, I’m confident there’s an album in there that I can end up really enjoying; it’s just not this one.