Convey

When was the last time you saw a good rock show? Not your favorite band from the high school days that got just back together for an overpriced reunion tour to tickle your nostalgia trip in the back row of the Enormo-Dome. When was the last time you saw an honest rock show, one born of beer and sweat, one that invited you in close only to blow you away, leaving you pinned between a riff-engorged gut and a skull sent spinning from hooks that refuse to leave your ringing ears?

If you’re stuttering for an answer, you probably have yet to experience Convey.

To be fair, it’s not your fault. Having self-released they’re eponymous EP in the fall of 2016, the boys have been hidden for the past year, incubating ideas, fleshing them out, and not settling until the grooves cut as deep as the vocals do soar. Decades of digesting the legendary likes Led Zeppelin and Tool, then grafting them to a living love of Queens of the Stone Age and Circa Survive has yielded their new LP. Soon to be unleashed this fall, it will surely remind you just how rock should feel.

Stripping away any gimmicks, pretensions, or short cuts that sustains too much of contemporary music, Convey traffics in a breed of modern rock that knows its roots while flaunting its red-blooded realism in the 21st century. Vocalist Ben Cohen never fails to summon the neck hairs to attention with lyrics that can at once speak to personal tales of fear, addiction, and love or scream at social corruption and injustice. Jahan’s guitar lines threaten to snap from sultry to brazen and brutal at the crack of snare from Cory. And avoiding the all too common trappings of backing tracks and lap top loops, they do it all live with a full sound that betrays their ranks only four deep.

Many years and miles separate where they are now from when guitarist Jahan Rajabi and singer Ben Cohen met in art school and first hunkered down in a basement on the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts. They joined up with resident Rush disciple Cory Massing before finding bassist Luke Dennis in their new home of Los Angeles. That leaves a lot of ground to cover between their home of old and of new, so stay tuned, because they’re coming around to remind you just what rock should feel like.