4 out of 5

Label: Nightfloat Records

Produced by: Colin Marston

If you’re flipping back through your Dysrhythmia collection – which I hope you have! – perhaps you’ll see a telling evolution of album art along the way, that you can both align to the eras in which the records dropped, and also to how the group has progressed during that time. I’ll spare you my likely misfired analysis, but, heck, you can look at their record labels as well, starting out self-released and then math-rocking the eff out of Relapse, on to the artier fringes of Profound Lore, then the less-classifiable realms of Translation Loss, and finally… self-released again, the triumph of all long-lasting indie bands. But let’s qualify that self-releasing, as this album is coming out on Nightfloat Records, an imprint mostly housing Dys guitarist Kevin Hufnagel’s solo efforts, and so presumably Hufnagel’s own label. Circling back around to that cover art, ‘Coffin of Conviction’ dispenses with a lot of metal and prog drapery for a surrealistic piece depicting Tool-like maquette crawling about a padded room, which probably absolutely sounds like metal and prog indeed, but cast in its pastoral blues, is oddly quite peaceful, and contemplative. Album title ‘Coffin of Conviction’ equally has either a totally damning, devil’s-horns tone, or could be said in a kind of resolute, 25-years-of-making-music-their-own-way kind of vibe.

To that: this is a record that absolutely sounds like Dysrhythmia, but even moreso than when I’d kind of umbrella’d them under Colin Marston in a previous review: ‘Coffin,’ quite purposefully I’d guess, looks back to earliest Dys, which had a more jammy, jazzy undertone, and brings in some of the Relapse bass-heavy sturm and drang and production reverb, shot through with the intense prog of latter years, and then wrapped with… easy listening? Yeah, this is a celebratory disc that’s making all the eras of the band seem as one, brilliantly mixing it together in a seamless fashion, adding a WTF soothingness in the way tracks are composed, whether they start out riff heavy or build up to that, culminating in chill, synth-y closer Light from the Zenith. It’s undeniable this is still metal, or however you want to classify the million-notes-a-minute pace the group can achieve, with Eber tip-tapping and pounding on drums as Hufnagel masterfully flips between rocking out and scaling Everest-like scales with ease, with Marston supporting on bass and guitar and exchanging the spotlight as needed, but instead of their being an exclusive emphasis on those scales, or the big moments, the group is confident in taking a step back a bit and letting tracks rather ebb and flow. This makes the uniqueness of each song more notable than it often is with technically impressive acts, although this relative indirectness also makes Marston’s production (recording, mixing, mastering) a bit off at times, aiming for a consistent, clean sound that doesn’t serve both the heavy and light moments equally; so when the group transitions from one to the other, it feels like it takes your ears a half-step to get back in the mood. That said, there’s also choice restraint in making those transitions, so you’re more positively distracted by how slick they are from a performance perspective, with the trio doing some wicked time / tone changes.

We thankfully never have to go too long without a Dysrhythmia record, and I have my preferences amongst their releases, but ‘Coffin’ is possibly one of their most directly accessible records that in no way curbs the complexity for which the group is known, and proves how to embrace the past and future of your band at the same time.