Converge - No Heroes

I have a lot of respect for this band. For the last 15 or so years they've been playing heavy music, and at this point I believe in everything they do. You can't play this kind of music and tear yourself apart on stage every night for that long and not love the hardcore lifestyle, and with No Heroes they reiterate why they're one of the most respected heavy bands out there.

The album takes a while to find its stride, mainly because it starts off with 5 songs that range from 0:58 to 1:43 long. The tracks are all great, but they're over almost before you get a chance to experience them. I would have appreciated at least one set of songs that were clearly meant to go together, like the 'Drop Out' / 'Hope Street' combo off the band's previous album You Fail Me, but when the title track kicks off in the 6 spot you know it's a full-on Converge album.

Despite the fact that the main riff could come from a mid-term project in a Metal Riffs 101 class, the unflinching intensity of the song, which bounces from chorus to bridge to verse to breakdown in a nonstop flurry, ultimately drives it home as a song worthy of the album's title. The next track, 'Plagues', serves as a sludgy meltdown after the craziness that preceded it. While it's a surprisingly effective opener live, the greatness of the following track basically turns it into a skipper; when you know that 'Grim Heart / Black Rose' is just around the corner there's no reason to wait through a 5-minute meltdown.

I'll say right now that 'Grim Heart / Black Rose' is one of the best songs Converge has ever written. The first half of the song is a slow, dark dirge sung by guest vocalist Jonah Jenkins. What?! Clean vocals on a Converge album? Yep, and it works. While I find the first portion of the song a little cookie cutter due to the lack of variation in the vocal line, the riff at 3:48 hits you like a sledgehammer in the chest, and the fact that the clean vocals continue instead of breaking into screams only highlights the power of the song. From here on there's no turning back. The song melts down into a minimalist mix of guitar and bass with just a touch of cymbals before the build of builds begins. While not quite on par with the greatest of GYBE!'s climaxes, the final third of 'Grim Heart / Black Rose' is pure post-rock. And it's unreal. It's hard to believe that the same band that started the album with 5 tracks shorter than a commercial break has the patience to let a song grow to a boil like this, but they do. And when the bottom finally drops out the closing explosion is ridiculously brutal. I get excited just typing about it.

The next two tracks, 'Orphaned' and 'Lonewolves', are standard Converge songs, which is fine since a filler track on a Converge album would be the crowning achievement of some wannabe band's career. Once those two are out of the way, 'Versus' comes out of the gate with burning intensity and never lets up. Even the measure-ending triplets are on fire, and the time-cycling chorus riff at 0:49 incorporates a high note that I can only describe as crazy. It's not any sort of virtuoso performance, it's just a super-interesting choice that somehow makes the high/low metal riff thing sound fresh again. Every time I hear that note I wince in pleasure and tilt my head, trying to get inside the note. It's a good thing they did something interesting with 'Versus', because the next song is a disappointment.

Along with 'Plagues', I feel like 'Trophy Scars' is the album's only other misstep. It starts off well enough, but as soon as it devolves into the way-too-emo palm-muted all-out whining I have to skip to the next track. The lyrics are just too trite. Later parts of the song are quite good, but the constant returns to the seemingly never-ending emo-whining are just too much to overcome. It's just not good.

Luckily the song is followed by 'Bare My Teeth', which reminds me of a longer version of 'Hope Street' from You Fail Me. It's got a great melodic hardcore opening riff and a brutal stop/start bridge, but it's also longer than a minute long and is thus a nice gem found toward the end of the record. 'To The Lions' is a perfectly competent closer (and it gets extra points for the gratuitous use of the pick slide), but on some level the entire second half of the album feels like the afterglow of 'Grim Heart / Black Rose'. On previous albums, 'To The Lions' would have been a standout, but on No Heroes it's merely a very good song, which is really just a credit to how amazing the high points of the album are. By the time the song fades out with what can only be described as a guitar lead edging suspiciously close to guitar solo territory (I think of it as a pseudo-solo) you feel chewed up and spit out. But in a good way.

Production-wise, this is the best-sounding album that the band's guitarist, Kurt Ballou, has ever turned out. He's produced and engineered numerous albums at his own GodCity Studios, but this is the first time that he's taken the reigns on a Converge album. Maybe that's what it took to finally nail the sound that showed promise on Jane Doe but sounded a little too thin and noisy on that outing. You Fail Me got closer to the signature Converge sound, but Ballou finally nailed it on No Heroes. Every element of the music is well-represented, and this is hands-down the best that Ben Koller's drums have ever sounded; the bass drum finally sounds thundering but tight, and the snare and cymbals have all sorts of crispness. The guitars and Nate Newton's bass of course sound wonderfully dirty, and the vocals are as raspy and brutal as always. Put together, the distortion and blending of the elements makes the entire band sound like one huge angry instrument, not a collection of 4 guys each doing their own thing. It's amazing.

Lyrically there's not much to say. Jacob Bannon has apparently had some unfortunate experiences with women, and the track names alone should be enough of a clue that Converge is still singing about pain, failure and betrayal. The album art is also classic Converge; Bannon went nuts with the muted colors, dark imagery and Photoshop filters. It works, but it seems a little too well-composed when compared to the group's ultra-raw sound.

All in all this is a fantastic, powerful album, and if it weren't for a few throwaway songs I would give it 5 stars in a heartbeat, since the best songs on the album are life-changers. The centerpiece songs really give the album a heart that I've never experienced this fully on a Converge record; it doesn't just feel like brutality for the sake of it, which is what helps this album transcend into the land of the classics.

4.5/5 Stars

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