Seems like Converge have still got the moves, hacking and gouging at all and sundry with easily their best sound yet, less muddy than ‘When Forever Comes Crashing’ and more refined than ‘Petitioning the Empty Sky’, everything is pushed up front and pressed against your face with unblinking eyes. Musically this is along the logical trajectory you’d expect having heard the splits with Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Hellchild, more of their patented psycho metal, frenetic riffwork and jazzed out spackery, nailed down with precision drumwork and sealed with poison kisses from Jacob Bannon, a surefire contestant for world’s bitterest frontman thanks to his spite-filled harpy scream.
As with their later releases there’s a steady progression here, some songs sounding far spacier and epic than ever before, sometimes weaving delicate guitars with pulsating grooves and the wishy-washy effects that surfaces on their Cure and Depeche Mode covers. Songs touch all past bases and push further on into the ether, from metallic freak-outs to more hardcore numbers, Swans / Neurosis-tinged lurkers (which sees the influence of Jake and Kurt’s Supermachiner sideproject creeping in) and one song (‘Distance And Meaning’) which sounds curiously akin to some sort of Blood Brothers / Jesus Lizard hybrid, in the way that Botch did that odd little number on their ‘American Nervoso’ album. The album’s definite highlight, though, is the final track: an eleven-and-a-half minute rock opera that combines all the aforementioned fucked up elements into one glorious splurge of aural oblivion.