Unfurl – Ascension Review

I’ve found it hard to pull myself away from doom metal through the first half of 2023. It’s been an absolutely stellar year for lugubrious metal heads, with established bands and newcomers alike dropping powerfully glum slabs of trudging riff-craft, disconsolate wails, and lachrymose lamentations on a near-weekly basis. This has been problematic for my general health, not to mention morale in the House of Doom. My wife has expressed concern at my increasingly sallow pallor and the lead grey rings spreading beneath my eyes. The other night she found me at 2 a.m. hunched in the sickly light of the open refrigerator, a rueful, vacant gaze fixed on a jar of pickles, murmuring something about the cold that will one day take us all. While working in the garden, I absently observed that thistles, brambles and entropy are the world’s natural state, while our flowers and tomato plants are ephemeral. At preschool, the Cherdlet drew a picture of me crying on a barren hill in grey crayon. So, for the sake of my family, I’m putting aside funeral doom and listening to something grind-y for a change. Let’s see if Pittsburg, Pennsylvania’s Unfurl can bring the color back to my cheeks.

Unfurl adhere to the school of posts—post-grind, post-death, post-hardcore—that also gives us such bands as Full of Hell and Wake, and Ascension is their third full-length LP. Grindcore is the base of their sound, but these knotted compositions can suddenly swerve into sludgy doom trudges (“Trembling in the Threshold”) or ethereal clean flourishes (“Hyperviolet Estuary”) on a dime. A handful of genres can be heard at any given time, but Ascension is really a tale of two albums. The first is comprised of dense, violent post-grind over the first five songs. The second starts with “Hyperviolet Estuary,” when heavy doses of melodic post-hardcore, edging slightly toward screamo, take over for the final three tracks. More on that in a bit.

If you’re looking for something to knock the cobwebs loose, that first set of songs will clear your sinuses, pop that crick in your neck and give you a slight case of brain bleed. The buzzing onslaught of appropriately titled opener “Coiled Serpent” is nastiness personified. Structurally, the song unwinds slowly while the riffs and harsh vocals work the listener over like a boxer on a speed bag. The second half is more melodic than the first, but it never loses the peel-your-skin-back brutality. This same energy flows through the first three songs until the back half of aforementioned “Trembling in the Threshold,” when a stomping sludge riff grinds things to a crawl like an aneurysm suddenly ruptured and now everything is confusion and dizziness and difficulty swallowing. Things pick up where they left off with “Burning Question,” and before you know it, 20 minutes of ass-kicking have flown by.

“Hyperviolet Estuary” changes the direction of Ascension significantly. A prog-like riff opens the song, and overt melody underpins Dale Wacker’s acidic blackened hardcore shrieks. At first, it’s a nice wrinkle to the previous 20 minutes. But once the clean vocals kick in, a fork appears in the road. For the remaining 20 minutes, those cleans, as well as a more emotive ethos, become the defining sound of Ascension. The result is a sort of early aughts melodic hardcore with prog-y twists. Unfurl are obviously talented musicians and play the style well, but I don’t enjoy the shift. There’s a cloying timbre to the clean vocals, which by the end of closer “Longitudes and Leylines” oddly sounds like Billy Corgan on the quiet parts of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Eighteen-year-old me would be thrilled by this, but 45-year-old me is less so.

Overall, Ascension fares well among its post-grind peers, though mileage will vary on the mid-album shift. Our own Kenstrocity said it doesn’t bother him in the least, but he’s a mush-minded golden retriever of a human and his opinion isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.¹ Those familiar with Unfurl’s previous record The Waking Void won’t find anything as immediate as “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” but Ascension still offers plenty to like.

Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self Release
Websites: vnfvrl.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/VNFVRL
Releases Worldwide: June 2nd, 2023