Artist: Converge
Album: You Fail Me
Label: Epitaph
Tracks: 12
Length: 35:26
Reviewed by: Ben Bishop

The first listening experience I ever had with Converge came when I unexpectedly stumbled across the track “My Unsaid Everything” on some Equal Vision sampler I had picked up in high school.  It was one of those compilations where stylistically disparate bands are lined up one after the other.  As I remember it, I was doing geometry when some mediocre emo band finished their song and my ears were scorched as out of my stereo stormed one of the harshest gales of noise I had ever weathered.  Jacob Bannon’s voice sounded like a man being burned alive.

It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I became a genuine Converge fan, when a friend of mine gave me a copy of Jane Doe, the 2001 record that saw the band firmly establish themselves as the royal family of thrash hardcore.  There are few if any bands in heavy music today who can go blow to blow with Converge in terms of blending precise delivery and inventive song structures with unbridled passion and intentionally scaled back production levels. 

Tightness couched in a wall of static and feedback has been one of the most noticeable of Converge’s idiosyncrasies since early on.  Stylistic correlations are particularly evident between Jane Doe and You Fail Me.  Kurt Ballou’s guitar tones are virtually the same on both records, with just a touch more of a live-wire, electric shock feel on the new record—lots of treble, heavy distortion, and a light coating of fuzz.  And while the guitars and bass feed back just like your high school neighbor’s garage band, it’s a controlled burn, as the foursome tears through the amalgamation of breakneck stops and starts, time signature changes and blast beats that they helped popularize in the mid-nineties.  Always turning on a dime, rhythmically tighter as a drum, there is just a hint of roughness around the edges— the weird glow of punk rock energy which hovers around the band bleeding through and colorfully tinting their technical proficiency with an organic accessibility that they have been pulling off for a good five years longer than the Hives or any other garage band. 

The sheen of punk rock ideology glimmers on nearly everything the band does.  Vocalist Jacob Bannon continually espouses a DIY perspective in interviews, and makes good on it, handling all of the band’s design needs, penning lyrics that actually seem to mean something passionate in a scene emotionally bankrupt, and running his own Deathwish label. 

As for the songs themselves, six clock in at two and a half minutes or less, twice as many as the last record.  The unchecked thrash of Jane Doe has remained intact, although many of the harder songs de-crescendo into beautiful trainwrecks towards the end, not slowing in tempo but dropping to half-time, with breakdowns heaving on the lilting syncopation of Ballou’s hammer-ons and Ben Koller’s brilliant drumming which leaves spaces that say more than twenty of his peers tired china-crashes.  Heartless and Hope Street are both perfect examples, while the arpeggiated finale of Dropout is the most compelling close to any Converge track recorded in the last four years.  The guitar wails, pushing it’s harmonics ever upward as Bannon’s roars matches it, spiraling into shriller and shriller exclamations.  If he didn’t continue shrieking he would undoubtedly begin weeping.

Bannon has been open about the lyrical content of the last two records, stating that they revolve around the end of a several-year relationship and his subsequent search for meaning in the wake of that loss.  Opting to forego even separating lyrics out by song, instead simply printing an entire album’s worth of words in one block in the liner notes, Bannon’s writings are as powerful as ever.  While in some sense remaining ambiguous, there is a feeling of real openness in the lyrics, and it would be hard to imagine many listeners not being able to relate in some way with the searching heart revealed in the album’s closing lines.  “Hanging moon / Haunting you / Hanging moon / Be my light in this world of darkness.” 

It is their music that has won them our respect.  It is their openness and integrity which have earned them our admiration.  Not perfect by any means, and yet nearly peerless, Converge have again delivered a record worthy of our attention.  Do yourself a favor—sit down and spend some time with this latest epic carved from the creative will and human emotion of four men who represent a coalescing of talent that comes along but once in a generation.