Converge’s latest album is out on this New Music Friday – revisit Live4ever’s review and stream ‘Love Is Not Enough’ right here.
The blurb that accompanies Love Is Not Enough has one killer line that stands out as a metaphor both for the record and Converge’s existence.
In seeking to describe the ten song, thirty-minute salvo of Converge’s eleventh album of a career stretching back thirty-five years, the author just leads with the pithy but arrow accurate: “There isn’t an ounce of fat.”
That may also seem a strange thing to say, but the band themselves are keen to double down on it, vocalist Jacob Bannon tying it off with: “Sometimes the perfect take is the one that has some wildness to it.”
“It’s not perfectly executed. There’s a lot of powerful moments on this record and a lot of angry moments. The realism amplifies that.”
For Bannon and his fellow Converge members Kurt Ballou (guitar), Nate Newton (bass) and Ben Koller (drums), the idea of somehow polishing their sound – which for the uninitiated blends many different flavours of metal with punk, screamo, hardcore and anything else they fancy – is anathema.
Having formed in Massachusetts in the mid-90s, they equally refuse to be defined by the neo-classic status afforded to 2001’s Jane Doe, or give any head to the machismo that permeates the male dominated, extreme noise fringes of the various movements they live in.
The title Love Is Not Enough sums up where Bannon feels many of us are, struggling to find the empathy and personal energy to live beyond insulating ourselves from fear or harm.
To express this without anger is difficult in any medium, but the titular opener isn’t willing to concede an inch, a thrash tempo blast of metal overload with a stark message for the conceited: “We must grow to stomach the taste of our own blood/We have to accept that love is not enough.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.live4ever.uk.com ’
