Band:	Konvent
Album:	Puritan Masochism
Style:	Death doom metal
Release date:	January 24, 2020
A review by:	nikarg

01. Puritan Masochism
02. The Eye
03. Trust
04. World Of Gone
05. Bridge
06. Waste
07. Idle Hands
08. Ropes Pt. I
09. Ropes Pt. II

Four ladies. Nine tracks. One debut full-length album. Forty-eight minutes of death doom. Loads of hype.

Is the hype justified though? Let's find out.

For starters Konvent is an all-female death doom band playing fairly typical death doom (with some emphasis on the "death" part nonetheless), so not much there to leave you flabbergasted. Their riffs are slow and crushing for the most part, as you would expect from a doom album, and the melodies are there but they don't overwhelm the music to the point of assigning the 'melodic' tag, while the guitars have serious amounts of sludgy filth at times. The low end on this record is tombstone-heavy, as you can hear in the opening notes of "Trust" and "Waste", and this is one of the most enjoyable things on Puritan Masochism (along with the aforementioned sludge element). The other truly remarkable feature is the voice of Rikke Emilie List, whose deep gutturals and insidious shrieks rise over the crawling riffs to give you the sense of absolute existential dread.

The opening title track is surely going to stick in your head for days, and from then on the album really doesn't let up. Even though there isn't much versatility demonstrated and there are no great shifts in speed, the oppressive and claustrophobic feel of the album really sucks you in. The emotional peak is reached with the closing track in two parts; the trudging rhythm and melancholic guitar lines of "Ropes Pt. I" are perfectly combined with Rikke's outstanding vocals, while "Ropes Pt. II" is the clear highlight because of its ability to build up the intensity throughout its duration with the use of various vicious riffs that in the end dissolve into a skipping record-sounding, droney ending.

To answer the introductory question, the hype is justified in the sense that this is a terrific album within its style. That said, this style of doom has already been done to death (pun intended) and Puritan Masochism neither offers anything new nor is as raw, diverse and groovy as the band's 2017 Demo. It is, however, doom to the core, its guitars are dripping lead, and its rhythm section is thicker than a rhino's skin. And, for me, all this is convincing enough.

"Into an endless world of gone
Aimlessly..."