Wear Your Wounds

Dunedevil (2017)

Keegan

It’s a tale as old as time. Our hero holes himself up in a cabin in a remote location, spends some time in isolation, and emerges with the bones of an album and a 286-page multimedia art book. This time it’s Converge frontman J. Bannon who embraced his inner Thoreau/Justin Vernon by spending a week in a shack (their words) in the Peaked Hill Bars district of Provincetown, Massachusetts. He spent his days taking photographs, creating art and sketching out a song each day with a portable recording setup powered by solar energy. The songs were fleshed out and mastered over the winter while the art and photography were collected into a book. Both are called Dunedevil and are meant to be enjoyed separately or as a single multi-sensory experience.

Dunedevil was released as an album by Bannon’s solo project Wear Your Wounds and came out only a month after the project’s self-titled debut. There is a stark contrast, however, between the lo-fi acoustics and imposing post-rock of WYW and the soundscapes of Dunedevil. Instead, the album is seven tracks of contemplative, haunting instrumentals. Perfect music for playing in an art installation as patrons walk silently from one giant canvas to another. Maybe it’s the looming influence of Bannon’s more famous band, but the songs often sound like the short interludes ¾ of the way through a hardcore album that were briefly in vogue.

This is not to say that the songs on Dunedevil are interchangeable or forgettable. While primarily piano over electronic backgrounds, the songs range from the menacing trudge of the opening track ‘Invitation’ to ‘Outsiders’, with its syncopated rhythms that feel more like Debussy than Jane Doe. Bannon isn’t completely wedded to the piano either. ‘Insects’ layers nature sounds over ambient electronics in lush, calming waves while the closing song ‘Be Still My Heart’ has the only lyrics on the album along with acoustic guitar playing from Mike McKenzie (The Red Chord).

I can’t speak to the effect of reading Dunedevil while listening to the accompanying album, though I was able to view a few pages of the preview, and the two definitely enhance each other. The album stands well on its own though as a mostly instrumental, atmospheric testament to Bannon’s artistic versatility and the idea of isolation as inspiration. Fans of Converge looking for more of the same, or even fans of the first Wear Your Wounds album, may be surprised or disappointed by Dunedevil but the album has a lot to offer anyone willing to push past that initial feeling and sink into its depths.