The word underground now means very little when supposed fringe players are turning up for their headline festival slots in helicopters, so it’s a relief to have a new Converge album in hand. Jacob Bannon and crew are arguably after all the underground band’s underground band, a quartet who emerged from the primal Massachusetts hardcore scene in the nineties and then raised the stakes considerably for everything with 2001’s neo-classic Jane Doe.
Even old dogs learn new tricks though and Love Is Not Enough follows the band’s collaboration with Chelsea Wolfe Bloodmoon:I, a project on which they created layers of gothic majesty whilst still retaining an innate sense of power. Their eleventh outing however is more orthodox, if you can call their gristle-tough amalgam of metal, hardcore, punk and everything in between anything remotely close to that.
Bannon growls, screams and shreds his way through the ten songs here with impressive conviction, Distract and Divide and To Feel Something exhaling like they’ve just been brought into the world and then punched in the face. Personal experiences add meaning and intensity to Bad Faith, however it’s the closing duo of Make Me Forget and We Were Never Enough that find the group’s ideas fully realised and delivered with zeal and a sense of compulsion. There are underground bands and there are bands like Converge – and Love Is Not Enough shows the venn diagram’s centre between the two is remarkably small.
You can read the full review here.
The Voice Of Unreason 