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Converge: You fail me
12/06/09 || Khlysty
Generally, I don’t enjoy Converge. I find their spastic hardcore-math-emo-whatnot style to be jarring and exhausting. I like to be pounded to pulp, BUT I have to have something to justify the beating. And, sorry folks and fans, but most of the time I find that Converge don’t give me the small jutting of the rock on which to hold on to; that they create great songs for the moshpit, but songs that are incapable of touching me deeper than that.
That’s why I was fucking amazed by how good –no, scratch that, how great and how important “You Fail Me” is. I listen to it, while writing this review, as I have listened to it a gajillion times since I bought it (a few days after it came out) and I am still tongue-tied as I try to convey through words the power, the emotional weight these twelve songs continue to carry within them. I mean, the song “You Fail Me” just kicked in and I’m in fuckin’ goosebumps! And I must have listened to it over a thousand times. Fuck, I paid 25 euros to see them live a few years back, just to hear them playing it and, man oh man, it was a fucking religious experience. A black satori. A constant “j’ accuse” towards everything and anything that makes us feel emotionally shipwrecked.
And that’s only one of the most harrowing group of songs this band and any other band (with the probable exception of The Refused) has ever laid to tape. Jacob Bannon’s screaming takes in this record a hue of such dark desperation that only someone totally jaded won’t be touched by his calling out (or, better, screaming out) to the “hearts still beating”, during the record’s proper opener, “Last Light”. The band still churns out great jagged squalls of noisy hardcore-cum-math-metal (“Black Cloud”, “Drop Out”, “Eagles Become Vultures”), but this time the name of the game is “variation”: thus, the centerpiece of the record is “You Fail Me” (with its bulldozer sound and lyrics like “You fail me with every abandoned love, You fail me with your inferno fuck-me eyes”) and the country-and-western-from-Hell “In Her Shadow”, in which the band goes all acoustic in a song that’s more scary than a walk through a cemetery and finding your own grave there.
But, that’s not all: see, Converge, with “You Fail Me” make a statement as clear and as caustic as possible for a musical unit. “Death King” is like a constant breakdown, “In Her Blood” is nightmare staff, dissonant and angular as fuck, while retaining the emotional heft that runs rampant throughout the record, while “Hanging Moon” sounds like a truck full of broken hearts going berserk and running uncontrollably, pulverizing anything stupid enough to stand in its path. Fuck, every song, every riff, every vocal-chord-shredding scream, every drum roll, everything here is calculated to evoke some of the deepest, darkest feelings: despair, anger, broken hope, fury… All’s here, churning, hitting the listener, kicking him in the gut. This is electric music for cleansing the body and the soul.
I think it would be stupid to tell you about the band. I mean, here we’re talking about four individuals of peerless talent, determination and professionalism. Kurt Ballou, acting again as producer, gives the band a sound so huge, so devastating that the songs don’t play out: they jump out of the speakers with electric life and intent on harming your soul, not just your body. “You Fail Me” remains, at least for me, the peak of a great band and one record that made history. I don’t think that Converge will ever be able to surpass it, and that’s good: if that was possible, then the record made will be sold only with doctor’s prescription and it would cause so much harm, that it would be destroyed almost immediately after hitting the stores…
9,5 hearts still beating out of 10.
- Information
- Released: 2004
- Label: Epitaph Records
- Website: www.convergecult.com
- Band
- Jacob Bannon: vocals, lyrics, visuals
- Nate Newton: bass, vocals
- Ben Koller: drums, percussion
- Kurt Ballou: guitars, vocals, bass, percussion, keyboards
- Tracklist
- 01. First Light
- 02. Last Light
- 03. Black Cloud
- 04. Drop Out
- 05. Hope Street
- 06. Heartless
- 07. You Fail Me
- 08. In Her Shadow
- 09. Eagles Become Vultures
- 10. Death King
- 11. In Her Blood
