Agenbite Misery - Remorse of Conscience Review by Ryan Cameron

Nature abhors a vacuum and art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. Art may be in constant conversation with other art, influence is a powerful language, in this art can also be a method of interpretation and decoding of what has come before. Metal as a genre of music has a history of projects drawing from literature to construct sonic mosaics of themes. The songs on New Hampshire metal band Agenbite Misery’s debut record Remorese of Conscience establish a clear kinship to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The band takes on the dense and oblique text in their own dense and unique ways.

Ulysses is a staggering work of modernist literature. The story is a broad retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey through the waxy point of view and stream of consciousness of Leopold Bloom. Joyce’s work is a wild and free floating adaptation of other art and literature. The book is in constant conversation with its influences as well as with itself, making it an oddly compelling and appropriate piece for a metal album to adapt and build itself upon. 

Remorse in Conscience blends a variety of genres and songs that drift between these styles which mimics the way Joyce would alternate his writing styles throughout the various episodes of Ulysses. Beyond the free roving nature of switching genres, In reading the lyrics culled and crafted by Agenbite Misery, the band looks to alchemize the opaque passages and themes from the various episodes of Ulysses and the result is eight tracks that sprawls and contracts with the absurdity and exuberance of the playful writing of Joyce. 

Remorse in Conscience has prompted me to think more broadly of the power of influence and the conversations that different works have with each other. The conversation that Agenbite Misery is in with Joyce’s work is one that highlights the alluring nature ov the absurd and how sits in our age that has drowned itself in the stream of collective conscious. The album is a celebration of art that after 100 years is still out on it’s own cutting edge. Remorse in Conscience flows on in the avantgarde tradition of taking on these old tomes in new and daring ways. 

For Joyce, to be confounding was the point. Leaving a work as rich and purposefully esoteric as Ulysses was his way of claiming immortality through the utility of obscurity. A band like Agenbite Misery forming exactly 100 years after the initial publication of Ulysses have used their skills as musicians to invite fresh minds to the text, to express their admiration for the maximalist text with their heavy palette of sound expelling both the brutality and beauty in sadness that fills the story of Ulysses.