This Is A Sickness And Sickness Will End is the third studio album from Canadian satanic/doom punk (?) band Crusades. I don’t know how to accurately describe their music, it’s not horror punk like the Misfits, it’s kind of like Boysetsfire but less hardcore and more dark, like if you took the creepy side of the church and made it into punk music. To add to the weirdness, each song on the album is titled with a number (I think a year, but for all I know if could be some kind of bible reference thing) for example “1590” followed by an actual name in brackets so it can actually be identified. This is absolutely not the kind of music I would find by myself but they are signed to Anxious and Angry and I heard one of their songs on that podcast so decided to check out the album. The first thing to notice is the cool but dark album cover of a black background with sketched hands overlapping each other holding an urn, it really fits in with the whole feel of the album. The vinyl for the album also looked amazing but unfortunately I couldn’t afford the shipping costs when it first came out and now the amazing purple/green splatter on black variant is out of print.
Onto the songs, as I mentioned before they have creepy number titles but thankfully have been given bracketed identifying names. That said, I still don’t know the songs particularly well and can’t necessarily catch many of the lyrics when listening to it through. Due to my inability to really differentiate the songs this will probably be a very short review just considering the album from a high level and overall point of view. The music is dark, the instruments sound rich and are very well played making a grand sound. Musically the songs could be the soundtrack to a dark movie or musical as they are able to extract so much emotion and take the spotlight of the album. Normally when you hear dark punk music the guitars are distorted and the recording is fuzzy but not in this case, the recording is sharp which is probably wha draws me more to this than other dark punk music. The vocals match the music perfectly in their half punk/half metal style, at times sounding creep-ily churchy with long drawn out words before each musical crescendo.
Overall, I am surprised to enjoy this album as much as I do. It’s not something I would normally listen to and not something I would seek out by myself, but when you listen to the album through it’s an experience. I imagine the experience would be bolstered by putting the beautiful vinyl on the turntable and just sitting back and focusing on the album. Its like watching an epic movie and it’s awesome.
6.5/10
Matt Power
21 December 2017
