01. Arctic Summer
02. Empty Vessel Hymn
03. Sprawl In The City Of Sorrow
04. Pleading For The Scythe
05. The Convalescence Agonies
When the biggest draw to your music was how your death doom integrated the violin, what do you do when the violin player leaves? You add cellos and keys!
Weeping Sores is a band I remembered quite fondly for their debut album, False Confession, one that grabbed my attention with its “minimal disgusting artwork” and kept it with “filthy death doom riffs”, as I noted in my review. But I can’t deny that what made the band feel the most unique was the fact that one member of the trio was a violin player, and the way the band integrated the violin in their sound didn’t sound like a cheap My Dying Bride copy. Seeing that there’s now a new Weeping Sores album, six years after my first contact with them, I was pretty bummed to see them now being a duo, following violinist Gina Hendrika Eygenhuysen’s departure.
The duo, comprised of drummer Stephen Schwegler and everything-elser Doug Moore, both also members of Pyrrhon, do find a workaround the lineup shift by recruiting some guests and session musicians for The Convalescence Agonies. I’m not entirely sure how large is the contribution of each of them, as the credited additional guitars (by Replicant‘s Peter Lloyd) and banjos are less noticeable, and the keys from Moore’s bandmate in Scarcity, Brendon Randall-Myers do pop in occasionally, but the biggest impact is done by cellos provided by Annie Blythe, who doesn’t seem to have many other credits aside from a collaborative album with another of the session musicians here. Granted, Weeping Sores are banking on the fact that most people, yours truly included, can’t really tell the difference between violins and cellos anyway, but their inclusion makes The Convalescence Agonies feel like a natural continuation of False Confession.
I’ve made the case in my review of their debut that there’s a lot going for the band’s music aside from the novelty of its string inclusions, and a lot of their music works with its absence anyway. The growls dominate the vocal side of the album, and even though there’s no clean singing, the deviations into shrieks and the shifting tone of the growls themselves don’t make the vocals feel monotonous. That’s also helped by how dynamic the instrumental side of the album feels like, with ever-shifting melodies that give an air of technical/progressive death metal to the death side of doom death, while the doom side feels a bit more diminished compared to its predecessor. Within this sea of intricate extreme metal, the keys and especially the cellos do add some welcome nuance, even if they have less of a share this time around, though it is enough to make me hope that either Brendon or Annie or both would get more integration as band members the next time around.
The Convalescence Agonies walks the line between showing how the band’s appeal lied beyond the violins and continuing the extra instrumental integrations, and as a result it’s doing much more than just survive its lineup shift.
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Written on 03.06.2025 by
Doesn’t matter that much to me if you agree with me, as long as you checked the album out. |