(written by Islander)
You might see the band whose music is the subject of this premiere identified as Conflux. But the complete name is The Conflux Collective, so-named mainly because the two musicians who initiated the project wanted to bring in a diverse group of extreme vocalists to accompany their compositions.
Those two musicians — drummer, composer, and producer Tommy McKinnon (Derelict, Akurion, ex‑Neuraxis, ex‑Augury) and guitarist Chase Fraser (Continuum, ex‑Decrepit Birth, ex‑Animosity) — conceived the band after a chance reunion in a Montreal fast‑food joint following a King Diamond show on 2016. In fairly short order they wrote and recorded a debut EP named The Inception, which included a different well-known Canadian death metal vocalist on each song, utilizing the talents of Cryptopsy vocalist Matt McGachy, Beneath The Massacre vocalist Elliot Desgagnés, and Mike Disalvo of Coma Cluster Void, Akurion, and ex-Cryptopsy.
The Inception received an enthusiastic response around various corners of the web (including here at NCS), but various life circumstances led to a long period of dormancy for the project. However, Tommy McKinnon made the wise decision to revive it, the results now encompassed on a debut album titled In the Wake of Saturn that’s set for release on June 19th.
As press materials describe it: “Armed with unreleased material from Fraser and a determination to finish what they started, [McKinnon] rebuilt the album from the ground up, writing new songs, reconstructing arrangements, recording all bass tracks by ear, and crafting lyrics drawn from deeply personal turmoil, transformation, and catharsis.”
And of course McKinnon also revived the idea of including different vocalists on the songs. It’s a hell of a collective:
L-R: Max Lussier, Jesse Brint, Mallika Sundaramurthy, Tommy McKinnon, Eric Burnet, Jeffrey Mott
The album includes the vocal talents of Jesse Brint (Gross Misconduct), Mallika Sundaramurthy (Emasculator, ex‑Abnormality), Jeffrey Mott (The Monster Factory, Growlers Choir, Hollow), Eric Burnet (Derelict, Samskaras), and Max Lusier (Derelict), who also contributed a blistering guitar solo.
What we have for you today is a lyric-video premiere of the album’s second single, a song named “Devouring Light“, with lyrics and vocals by Jesse Brint. As Tommy McKinnon explains:
It’s a deep song with many twists and turns… Chase’s guitar mastery shines throughout and is crowned with a beautiful solo. The song itself is a doom-leaning, torturous piece that is a groove-filled and crafty maelstrom of heavy riffs and open chords. The bass line is rich with attitude. The words talk about witnessing an ecological disaster of epic magnitude.
Need we add our own words to those? No, probably not, but of course we will!
The song’s opening moments create tension and are viscerally frightening. They combine wrenching howls, swaths of eerily ringing guitar, immense groaning bass tones, and methodically bludgeoning beats.
As the growled words (also frightening) cut loose, the tension doesn’t really break but the music morphs. The dissonant notes miserably writhe and dart away in strange angles; the drums variably clatter and slug in ways that both exacerbate the music’s feeling of dementia and create a vivid rhythmic counterpoint to the increasingly hallucinatory effect of the fretwork.
A shrill and swirling guitar solo rises up, creating its own kind of ecstatic counterpoint to the music’s chilling manifestations of confusion and despair.
Yet those very same melodic motifs that make the music so unsettling also turn out to be hooks: as they surface and re-surface, strangely ringing and warping, they dig in — as the bass-and-drum performances continue landing body blows while creating their own mystifying attractions.
Although this song, unlike the album’s first single, isn’t a high-speed cavalcade of technically eye-popping adventurousness, it’s still a technically impressive exercise, one that deploys the musician’s technical skills to create chilling hallucinatory effects.
Speaking of hallucinatory effects, the video creates its own. It’s a fascinating (and often creepy) amalgam of imagery that provides a visually arresting backdrop for the words.
We also invite you to listen to the album’s first single, “Reincarnation,” which premiered at Decibel. The vocalist on this one is Jeffrey Mott, and as McKinnon has stated, it “gives an impression of how the album sounds as a whole, with all the elements explored in depth in the other songs”.
In the Wake of Saturn was produced by Tommy McKinnon, and it was mixed and mastered by Jeanne Comateuse at Magma Art & Sound. It features cover art by Filip Ivanovic. It comes recommended for fans of Cryptopsy, Necrophagist, Decrepit Birth, Augury, and Beyond Creation — and pre-orders are available now:
PRE-ORDER:
https://elasticstage.com/confluxcollective
https://confluxcollective.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-wake-of-saturn
CONFLUX COLLECTIVE:
https://confluxcollective.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/confluxcollective
https://www.instagram.com/confluxco