*DISCLAIMER* – This review will make excessive use of the words ‘brutal’, ‘hardcore’, ‘angry’, ‘vicious’ and other similar adjectives. With a band like Converge, it’s pretty much unavoidable. Right, so Converge have a new record out then. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been all that much into this band as they stray just above my tolerance threshold for hardcore music, but I’ve always admired that they produced songs with technical ability, structure and talent. Their 2001 effort ‘Jane Doe’ showed that Converge do what they do best, far and above their contemporaries and fortunately ‘No Heroes’ doesn’t dispel that myth.
Opener ‘Heartache’ doesn’t waste any time in fucking up your stereo speakers. With its ridiculously distorted vocals courtesy of frontman Jacob Bannon and some fine drop-tuned bass and guitarwork, it’s something of a master class in showing how anger should be portrayed in a musical fashion. From here on in, there really is no letting up, and the brutality is consistent throughout. With riffs that dance manically between obscenely low down the octave to high pitched harmonics, it’s not a record that bores and ultimately makes earlier hardcore acts such as Refused and Bad Brains sound tame. While there are more refined points in the record, such as the strangely ghost-like ‘Weight of the World’, this is still probably the most aggressive album you’ll purchase in 2006.
The album’s title track encapsulates what exactly Converge do best in its three minute lifespan. Combined with the fact that it succeeds one of the tamer songs on the record, it feels refreshing in the sense that this band has absolutely no compromise on how they want to sound. There are few bands around today, or indeed in the past that have made music as intense and skull-crushing as this, and for that Converge should be applauded. ‘Plagues’ takes a more heavy metal approach with an absolutely filthy guitar introduction that soon transcends into the familiar territory of painfully loud hardcore, while still retaining a Sabbath-esque riff underneath. Elsewhere, ‘Grim Heart/Black Rose’ allows us to hear a melody (yes – a MELODY) drip from Jacob Bannon’s lips which offers a refreshing break midway through the record.
As the album draws to a close with tracks like ‘Bare my Teeth and ‘To the Lions’, you feel that you haven’t just ‘listened’ to ‘No Heroes’, you’ve experienced a whole different world. Closing your eyes and listening to it in its entirety is one of the most surreal experiences you will go through musically and from start to finish, it leaves you feeling unfamiliar with the world around you in a somewhat comforting sense. As far as my musical tastes stretch, Converge are somewhere just outside of what I can handle. However, it’s nothing short of fantastic to hear a band retain every essence of what they’re about in the music they create, and do EXACTLY what they want, how they want to do it. ‘No heroes’ is certainly not an album for the average music listener, and yes, Converge are in danger of carving out a distressingly small and exclusive niche market for themselves. However, it portrays a band that defies convention and classification to the point of sounding utterly unique.
Andy R