Wear Your Wounds - Rust on the Gates of Heaven

Converge’s Jacob Bannon has long sought to fulfill his artistic drive beyond the domain of the pioneering metalcore band, be it through his commissioned visual art pieces for other bands, his curation through his Deathwish Inc. label, or more recently with his solo auditory/visual project, Wear Your Wounds. Inclined more toward soothing ambiance that can either stay at rest or build into more in contrast to Bannon’s other artistic ventures, Rust on the Gates of Heaven is driven mainly by spacy guitar echoes, tempered percussion, and even piano backing up Bannon’s clean vocals, but the ambiance does in some instances (such as the title track and “Rainbow Fades”) swell into post-metallic atmosphere, and sometimes that post-metal reaches deep into the genre’s heavier side. Songs like “Tomorrow’s Sorrow” and “Lurking Shadow”, showcase Bannon’s enveloping capabilities with a more stripped back approach with just some acoustic plucking and misty ambiance to back up his voice until the more distorted shoegaze guitar work kicks in to finish it off, while songs like “Love in Peril”, “Paper Panther”, and “Brittle Pillar” keep it brooding and heavy from start to finish and build a thicker atmosphere by more familiar metallic means. It’s actually pretty impressive how versatile Bannon is with his capabilities to create ambience of varying shades through a variety of means on this album. It’s not the most groundbreaking or wildly thrilling album; it’s more about maintaining the meditative state it cultivates, and at that it does its job pretty well. There’s not much to get too hyped about as far as a post-metal/ambient rock album goes, but it’s an interesting enough peek into another side of one of metalcore’s most cornerstone figures.
Sometimes the waves submerge/10

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