It hits me that I’ve been on the Bloor train to Kipling for thirty five minutes. Day punches into the car, Jesus, so many of the backs of these buildings have a lot of graffiti, some of it is great too. I am staring at the backs of buildings instead of a Mediafire window; I am sitting on carpeted stains instead of opening my .RAR file; I am drifting around a humid campus instead of moving that godly white arrow towards the words “Dark Horse”. I might as well have been on a train thirty years younger, abusing my flat feet because my needle was broken, my speakers were not bought yet, and my friend had it all plus a new 12” album that made all of this a motivated experience.

No Heroes left with fucked up palm muted undulations, stomping on lungs, just fucking stomping all over them. You Fail Me left with a nylon migraine, a moist brain. Jane Doe left with everything turning gold, freezing it inside the larynx. And a year prior to that, Ben Koller and Nate Newton joined Kurt Ballou and Jacob Bannon in a decade’s lineup that began with the “Concubine” bent taps, the “First Light” rust, and the “Heartache” inner ear fluid release. From the surface of “Dark Horse” with a roll of snare racket, pulverizing into terrifying, bizarre, and ancient tracks that leave with a “Wretched World”, and all of Converge’s best friends in tow; Axe To Fall is the definitive expression of the post When Forever Comes Crashing roster. Likely unaware of their lofty future in being the foremost innovators of metallic hardcore after the fall of the Berlin Wall was not enough – Converge’s second era was bent on generating albums that were as viciously standalone as they were influential. The monochromatic face of Jane Doe herself has become a global iconography, a visual representation of just how devastating, emotionally resonant, and artistically pertinent aggressive music could be. That particular 2001 album was deified. If this is still the case, then Axe To Fall is Jane Doe’s demonic foil, a worthy Lucifer that not so much conquers Miss Doe, but bookends.

Equal parts a crusty wedge of blues with a butter-heart chorus, “Cruel Bloom” plays to a room which needs more smoke. I am finally here with eyes on a friend’s ceiling, listening to a track that brings as much solace in bytes as it would have as microscopic grooves on vinyl. Just what Axe To Fall needed:  some vulnerability. What slice ears as malicious 90’s death metal and  progressive details in it’s first ten  tracks, cleverly disguise vulnerabilities. A snare that arrives without a heralding crash during the finale of the title track, the breath before launching back into the groove of “Cutter”… These are moments that breach the solemnity of such a prolific output. They are base, instinctual tenets of heavy music that escape the ear buds and rip the glasses off your face in a filthy concert venue.

As advanced as this monument is, it is partnered with an essential return to styles that got this whole 15 years of progression started. Having assured listeners their confidence in sound, technique, and identity with No Heroes, Axe To Fall is liberated; and why not? These thirteen tracks are not research (that was No Heroes’ role), but self contained events tied by a sinuous momentum of feedback and hi hat graces. This album does not stop, it bleeds content into the following passages. Passages including densely technical writing, protracted touches of chaos with the thinner strings that are as eerie as they must be. The riffs moan and have a throat of their own here, with the customary chord centered breakdowns that make your head bang at just a little deeper an angle, greater than any other band can instigate. And be sure, riffs are the focus of Axe To Fall. Wish fulfillment is in spades… Just as you are hungry for d beat butchery, math distortion, and redolent sincerity, “Cutter”, “Slave Driver”, and “Cruel Bloom” answer respectively.  There are curvatures and range to the story in this album, and some that are plain fucking weird, tackling the more conflicting emotions these therapists are ready to confront. With the experiments on You Fail Me and No Heroes, Converge started great sentences that lacked returning punctuation. “Dark Horse” and “Losing Battle” answer these promises, reanimating robot ideas into starving predators, ready to fend for themselves. Diversity is not a new limb grafted onto Converge, but it is now the strongest.

“Recent Epitaph signees; punk metal”… The blood checkered sticker on You Fail Me’s jewelcase. Punk metal. All that rage sold in such a clean store with employees in uniforms. The girl with the cash register looks like she recognizes the product she is scanning , and for a millisecond is widening her eyes; shouting thoughts between “get ready to grow up tonight” And the foggy brain that was fourteen failed to pick the hardcore from the Entombed, the Bach from the Miles Davis, fuck all that. It was unbridled punishment from “Black Cloud” and fear in “Death King”, vomiting to “In Her Blood”; “Last Light” owned recklessness, with a breakdown? Antiseptic procedures to end songs? Get the fuck out of here with that. “Axe To Fall, reading into the words, sounds like the band is waiting for someone to tell them to stop making music, to stop going as a band.”  Is that a dare? Or a request? Who could lend their souls seven times in over a decade? Who are these people?

Koller does not know how to stop. There are no spaces left without the signature of a bass drum triplet, or a crash aftershock. Build ups are composed of energetic fills, where a tom hit is never unanswered without a few sixteenth notes on the snare to keep your heart rate exponential – This is all to be expected; there has never been any reason to question chops that are as devastating (hear: “Reap What You Sew”’s speed metal interlude) as they are clever (hear: “Damages”. The whole song is a grandfather clock ticking away to an explosion thanks to Koller). His skill is just so amplified on these songs, their unique structures leaving enough room to perform detailed fills, and alternating frenzy to allow for claustrophobic walls of blast. Newton has put a lot of bravery to disc with this release. There is a lot to love about the fact that is a four string bass performance, as Newton chooses from tones and notation to brew the perfect amount subterranean ferocity. There are impacts on “Slave Driver” where you can hear every metal rung on the string wail. As for his courage, this distortion is dropped more often than ever to define the soft-spoken melodic sense Converge has always possessed. Ballou has enlisted his clone to assemble more harmonies, solos, and straight ahead technical mindfuckery than any other album in Converge’s discography. The joyous reality of this is, that as well written and competent the solos are on Axe To Fall, they are still just as erratic as the bedlam on “The Saddest Day”. “Worms Will Feed” is his newest ballad, and dives off six strings with all the support of his Godcity Studios.  There are echoes along the edges of the minor chords in “Wretched Word” that return the chills from “Jane Doe”s final four minutes. Bannon mines here for deeper honesty and conviction at fearsome depths. His voice breaks at the end of his shouts, the only yelling that can be done with eyes stapled shut. There is no stylization here, get the fuck out of here with that, it is summoned from every scarred patch of the esophagus. The voice he owns is instantly recognizable, but had been more a distorted narration in all the bombast on recent albums. It would seem now that Bannon has dared the man at the soundboard to bury him in the mix even further, just so he can fucking claw out of it with all the force of lost girls, misfortune, and political outrage. He may not shriek into a megaphone to achieve this supremacy, but this feat is the summit of intensity; everyone quit.

Seven albums are there as a counterpoint to every new conclusion you form around heavy music. Converge open it up, because they built this city of risk. And the scariest aspect of Converge is that beyond them, there is a void. There are no landscapes that exist past their invention. Nothing is out there. With the four notes in “Wretched World”, there is a legacy that introduced two lines when Caring And Killing was still trapped on the four track. It is 2009, it is Axe To Fall, and the lines have met as a point, left with the hush of “Wretched World”. There is nothing left out there.

(9.7/10)