I have a process when I look for new Metal when promos drop: find the weirdest sounding shit possible. So if I see that a band is featuring banjos, a cellist, and a keyboardist… I’m fucking sold.

Such is the case with New York’s Weeping Sores and their blistering 2^nd album, The Convalescence Agonies. It’s about singer Doug Moore (Pyrrhon, Scarcity, Seputus) and his ongoing battle with a shoulder injury, and I’m here to say that this is a brutal album, a journey into one man’s painful recovery. Something I can totally sympathize with as I have my own fucked up appendages and a rolled-up shit stick for a spine; physical therapy can be torture sometimes… lemme tell you a story. I don’t need to though, because Doug does it way better than I ever could.

This is a nasty piece of work; at one point, they go from the depths of Doom to blistering Death Metal fury in the first song “Arctic Summer”, the tempo ratcheting up at the 5:25 mark and riding that fiery horse until the tracks end. There are only five songs on The Convalescence Agonies, but within its 43:29-minute existence, it manages to shove your face into places you never dreamed of.

This record swims in the murky waters of Sedimentum and Incantation and the other purveyors of cavernous Death Metal. “Empty Vessel Hymn” is what grinding tendons and bone-on-bone sounds like. It has this crazy infectious main riff over this skank as fuck beat, it’s almost like Primus went total Death Metal for one song.

“Sprawl in the City of Sorrow” has a heavy Neurosis/ Today is the Day feeling that implodes into itself, the track sucks you into its grasp and shakes you until blood shoots from your ears, it is a crushingly heavy 9:08 minute dive into oceans of pain.

The production is stellar, as is the cover art by Caroline Harrison. The mark of a great album is its cover art , and this is one of the best I’ve seen this year.

Next to last is the neck-snapping “Pleading for the Scythe” it heaves with menace, a knuckle dragging spectacle with so many chugs an squeals it’s fucking ridiculous. Near the end, there’s scattered blasting before kicking into a solid arena-style shredder.

The title track, which is also the last one, is where everything coalesces, one minute it’s breaking limbs and the next it’s slow burning and staggering brutality. It’s unrelenting and doomy as fuck. At the 7:30 minute mark it slows down and there’s that beautiful cello making the track into a gentle giant briefly before it goes almost DSBM, I mean the track is 14:24 minutes long so there’s plenty of time to throw some blast beats at you and a sick ass solo. The ending is stirring, and it melds perfectly into the beginning track with ease.

The Convalescence Agonies is an emotional gut punch at times and a spine-ripping machine at others. It’s one that you need in your collection on full rotation so that you can sufficiently digest what went into the making of this godly release. Highly recommended for you, fans of Disembowlment, Mordred, and Disharmonic Orchestra. Get it!

[Visit the band's website]

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