"We don't really take influence from other bands at this point; we've been a band for fifteen years so we just do our thing." --Jacob Bannon
Fall 2006 is dominated by the hype behind three albums: this one, Mastodon's critically acclaimed Blood Mountain, and Brand New's upcoming The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me. Everything else released this fall has been and will be largely ignored. Sparta has a new album? These Arms are Snakes too? You don't say. So did A Static Lullaby, My Chemical Romance, Hatebreed, Misery Signals, It Dies Today, Alexisonfire, The Black Maria, Scars of Tomorrow, and A Change of Pace. Normally people would care about those releases a lot more, but Converge and Mastodon simply own heavy music for the season the way Brand New holds post-Cure rock at its mercy.
Converge, being the legend it is, obviously has a lot of expectations, especially after releasing three, if not four or five, of the greatest albums of our time.
The band approached No Heroes with a "We got this" attitude. And did it work or what. Of course the fact that it's Converge is going to bias the opinion, but this album is--at worst--the band's second best.
Converge basically patented this brand of extreme metal-inspired hardcore and continually improve upon it. No Heroes makes it sound flawless, like they wake up and just improv this stuff out of the blue.
It sounds very raw in a good way, as the band intended. It is faster, livelier, and more intense than Converge's last three albums, and more thoughtful and well produced than their early works. Although the songs are arguably less premeditated than Jane Doe's and You Fail Me's, they are delivered convincingly and so energetically. And there's variation, three or four long songs, one or two more melodic songs (with Bannon reprising Guy Piccioto-like vocals), and mostly short, superheavy and superspeedy songs.
There's not much to say, if you like Converge, which you should or I'll kill you, get this album now. If you haven't heard them before, start with Jane Doe, and move progressively forward and back in time with their releases. And if you don't like Converge, I'll kill you. And if you need more persuasion, listen to "Sacrifice," "Lonewolves" and "No Heroes," and you'll hear what I'm talking about: raw, live energy that needs no introduction, nor a 400 word review.
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C.L. '07 |
