The GB Album Club 034 - Clairvoyant by The Contortionist

Duders! Welcome to the 34th edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! It took us a second to get our shit together, but we're back with some proggy post-rock that occasionally dips into metal and outright prog rock, for our album this week is Clairvoyant by The Contortionist! This album was selected by our good friend @justin258, and you can listen below:

Spotify

Apple Music

Bandcamp

Youtube

Here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we pick an album every week at random from our pool to listen to and discuss! If you want to submit your own pick, come join us at our Discord! We'd love to have you!

So I find myself in a weird spot on this one.

In a vacuum, I found myself at an arm's length with Clairvoyant. There's plenty of moments where the pace and the aesthetic changes, but for me personally, it still felt like it was painting a little too much inside the lines. (Or at least by my standard of what "coloring inside the lines" means. I know some would call me crazy for thinking that about this album, but let's put a pin in this conversation until one of my submissions comes up *cough cough Death Grips cough*) I frequently found myself too distracted by the function to pay attention to the form, which admittedly is an issue I have with techy/proggy music in general. I found the vocals kind of underwhelming and blah blah blah complain complain compain.

It's an album that, again, in a vacuum, I can respect from afar but can't quite engage with on a more meaningful level. But I'm not listening to this in a vacuum. I am listening to this after months of being out on the picket line at the WGA strike. (I'm pre-WGA, but I still have stakes in the game. Fuck the bosses and union forever.) All I've been listening to for the last few months is the dance music they play on the line.

Don't get me wrong, I love dance music. Hell, I made an excessively long playlist of dance/vibe stuff myself. (A song or two of which I heard from this very club!) But I've been listening to the same stuff for almost 90 days now. (Fuck the bosses and union forever.) So I pounced on this album like a man who's lost in The Outback pounces on the first live animal he sees.

Is this an album I see myself returning to? Probably not. But under these circumstances, I fucking loved this album. I know how insincere that sounds, but I had a genuine moment with this album that, again, I didn't really connect with that much. I was starving for anything that wasn't made to make you party or dance. I didn't care what. Then I listened to Clairvoyant and it felt like a full course menu, and it was unbelievably satisfying.

So, sincerely, thank you @justin258.

Favorite Songs: "Monochrome (Passive)," "The Center," "Relapse"

So I first heard this album years ago. Somewhere or another, Reimagined popped up as a recommended video or song or something and I listened to it and I thought it was pretty cool. I listened the entire album and ever since I’ve found myself coming back to it for a few listens every few months or so.

It’s great for a certain mood. One of those things you might not be able to put your finger on, exactly, but there’s a melancholic, contemplative vibe to the whole thing that almost always draws me in and keeps my attention. It takes that vibe and it kinda goes all over the place with it, both lyrically and musically, but it never really loses that vaguely “navel gaze-y” sense.

As time marches on and I get older and older, I find this stuff to be more of a happy spot for me than proggy death metal. Don’t mistake that for me saying I like that stuff less, but when I just need some tunes these days I don’t find myself reaching for Amon Amarth or Death or whatever quite as often as I used to. I think some of that’s “broadening my horizons”, so to speak, and listening to other things, but also I think I’m generally a less angry, irritated person on the other side of thirty, and sometimes that warrants something a little calmer.

I don’t often focus on lyrics much and that’s mostly true here, but what lyrics I do pick up on in this album mostly come across as self-reflection to me. Some parts of this album seem to have a much more concrete story going on (Monochrome (Pensive) seems to be the singer trying to process the suicide of someone close), but I still find myself thinking about where I want to go when listening to this album. Sometimes, anyway. Sometimes I just don’t think about anything and kinda soak it all in.

Anyway, I’m glad @unclejam23 enjoyed it and I hope someone else picks up on this album after seeing this post.

I mostly enjoyed this album, though I had a major technical issue with it. There were multiple songs with long outros at a very low volume. While this might be good for listeners with headphones on, I listen to most of my music in the car. That's on me, but it was an issue.

Past that, I enjoyed this album. I'm not much for screaming or growling vocals most of the time (as has been established), so that was nice to get some good technical music with some lyrical accompaniment. I enjoyed both Monochromes and Relapse particularly, but I liked the whole thing enough to give it a second listen.