Remember the myth of Sisyphus, the man condemned to spend eternity pushing a huge rock up the hill then watching it fall back down each night? Now there’s a Sisyphian brand of metal emerging from the Pacific Northwest. We’ll push the rock back up the hill after the jump.
Portland, Oregon-based Sisyphean Conscience got a lot of regional attention with the release of an EP three years ago and now this band is back in force with the recent release of the full-length album Malignant Transformation.
Vocalist Taylor Gorman says the members of Sisyphean Conscience have known each other forever.
“Seems like just yesterday that I heard (guitarist) Blaine (Brun) and our drummer Garrett (Haag) playing these songs that I saw so much potential in. Garrett and Blaine had been long time best friends for years and we had all known each other for years. Blaine and Garrett had been exposed to metal like Children of Bodom, Amon Amarth and Dream Theater very early on and had been playing metal together for years before I came along. The first time I saw them play together was in a guitar class practice room that we had at our high school. They were covering “Bow Down” by Born of Osiris and “Leica” by The Faceless and I was amazed. They were 16 or 17 and just shredding these songs. A couple of years and horrible band members later, I inevitably asked them to play music with me, or rather, let me work with them. It was at that time that I heard the music they were writing for the first time and it changed the course of my life, our lives, forever.”
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before, a band so bent on perfection that it took them forever to release a full-length. In fact, it’s a little like the myth of Sisyphus.
“Though this is definitely NOT a concept album by any means and was not written to be one, a lot of my lyrics do reference the Greek myth of Sisyphus, and the metaphor that presents itself within our band’s name. When looking for lyrical content for this album, I ended up digging deeper into our bands name, and what it means to me personally. Which I hope other people do as well but I guess we’ll see. For people that don’t know, in the story, Sisyphus was a tyrant who would coax travelers into his territory with promises of food and work, only to slaughter them and take their belongings for his own. He was sentenced to purgatory by Zeus where he was forced to push a giant boulder up a mountain for all of eternity as punishment for his crimes, never reaching to top of the mountain. My lyrics on this album are generally written with the concept of what Sisyphus might have went through in his mind as well as what he might have experienced physically, and are written to be left open for interpretation.”
Sisyphean Conscience has played plenty of regional shows but their goals are to tour behind this record. So if this unique take on metal is your thing, you might give these guys a shot.
-BS