Sons Of Providence – A Conscious End To Suffering – Album Review

Source // f1.bcbits.com

Every once in a while an album pops up that has you scratching your head in bewilderment; prompting a few relevant questions. Are these guys being purposefully obscure? Are you simply not ‘getting it’? Should you (metaphorically) lob it out of the nearest window or engage your brain and try to compute something new?

A Conscious End To Suffering is one of those albums.

In truth, first impressions of Sons Of Providence’s 2nd full-length weren’t great. Trying to get a handle on where they were heading proved fruitless and an irritating disregard for flow reared its head consistently. But, as the album progressed, all manner of rewards sprung forth as genre convention went out the window….along with our preconceptions.

It would be easier to list the genres/styles they don’t tackle as A Conscious End to Suffering seems to embrace it all. “Wish” takes the mournful one-note piano strokes of My Dying Bride and wistfully creates a sloth-like gothic soliloquy while “Inevitable” is anything but inevitable, a grinding industrialised ode to wrought emotion incorporating, oddly, Queens Of The Stone Age-styled stoner rock.

From the jazzy, free-form exercises in vocal-less experimentation on “Screaming” to the progressive metal of the rather riffy “The Complex”, the avant-garde nature of Sons Of Providence can sometimes feel a little forced; the annoyingly child-like bass line from opener “The Perfect Lie” grates with its trying-to-be-too-different simplicity.

However, elsewhere the crooning vocals engage, the abstract nature enlightens and Sons Of Providence prove to be a weirdly enticing proposition. We still don’t ‘get it’ but we sure as hell like it! 7/10