Converge,
Tonight, I began listening your new album, entitled Axe to Fall. I think this album is classified as hardcore? To be honest, I don’t care that much about genre, so I don’t know much about it. I’m trying to break into metal (it bothers me that I’ve written off a whole genre, so I’m uncomfortable saying I don’t like metal (I’ve recently broken into hip hop, which I also didn’t like until recently (in high school I said things like “You can’t spell “crap” without “rap” which I’ve gladly taken back))). I decided to give metal a shot, first by listening to hard rock bands like
Queens of the Stone Age (whom I like) and some of metal’s originator’s like
Black Sabbath (whom I also like).
So, yeah. I’m trying to be open-minded. Hell, I am open-minded. And maybe I’m wrong to associate hardore (keep in mind that this usually means “hardcore punk”) with metal more than punk. But man oh man, I liked
Boris. I liked
Mastodon. But after five songs of your latest record, I switched to
Okkervil River.
I’ll explain this genre thing. I guess hardcore does come from punk, but it shares little with that genre except a willingness (do I say willingness? I mean sincere attempt) to offend. Metal is hard and fast with vocals obscured by a vocalist who growls or whatever (I’ll probably never listen to power metal, by the way; if your vocals are as clean as
Blind Guardian, you’re probably singing about Lord of the Rings, and if you’re not
Led Zeppelin, I doubt you can get away with it). Hardcore, in my admittedly limited experience, is the same. In your band, we have a vocalist who doesn’t care to be understood, a drummer who cares only about hitting the bass drum as fast as he can, and a lead guitarist who’s desperately doing what he can to differentiate one song from the other.
But he can’t! Because it takes more than a lead guitar part to differentiate one song from the other. Jesus. I hate to say it, because it only makes it sound like I don’t care to listen closely enough to separate the songs from one another, but your band as a whole doesn’t care enough to separate the songs. Converge, you sound like you don’t care at all.
You sound pissed off. You (whomever writes the songs; I assume it’s the vocalist, but God knows when the songs are all this similar) are mad about something. And guess what! Because I’m a chump, I want to know what you’re mad about. I care about what Thom Yorke is sad about. I care why John Darnielle’s imaginary relationship is falling apart.
But you won’t tell me. I’ll be fair. I don’t know whether you won’t tell me because you’re too busy emoting or because you refuse to emote. Either way, you’re a blank slate. You don’t even make me empathize. I understand the feeling of anger, but I got the same feeling when Mastodon wrote about Moby Dick. In fact, Mastodon told me way about anger, even though there was no more insight into the novel than in any high school English paper about the book (again, I assume; I’ve never read the book, but based on what I know, Mastodon don’t give me anything that seems particularly original or creative).
Axe to Fall gives me lots of fast tempos. And you singer is so MAD about WHATEVER, I can’t even UNDERSTAND what you're SAYING. Tell you what, buddy. How ‘bout you say something? I only make this suggestion because you don’t. You don’t suggest intelligence. Your music doesn’t suggest innovation, either.
What do I look for in music? I suppose I’d say I look for innovation, but that’s not really true. I love
Radiohead because they do something different, but I don’t even listen to Radiohead that much these days. The band I listen to far more than any other is
The Mountain Goats, and guess what? Most of their twenty years of production is totally unoriginal. It’s a guy singing over roughly three chords on his guitar. After he switched to studio recordings, he didn’t up the chords at all; instead, he let his collaborators influence his music more.
It turns out that I don’t care whether what you do is new. I care whether you’re saying something new, or at the least, whether you’re saying something personal in a new way. And you, Converge, don’t. You’re not saying anything at all. You’re emoting, yes, but you’re not making a statement. You just shout impotently in case someone who’s equally impotent is listening.
Tonight, no such person is. On their last two albums, Okkervil River has written about being a rock star. As far as my actual experience goes, I can’t actually relate to this. Will Sheff, brilliant lyricist, makes me care regardless. Good music communicates feeling through the specific. Maybe I’ve never been a rock star; it doesn’t matter. Through his lyrics, Sheff has helped me to understand what it’s like to be a rock star. His band has given color to his lyrics; they’ve made them more interesting instead of obscuring them.
Converge, you would do well to learn from this. You make a lot of noise, but you don’t tell me anything interesting. Unlike other modern bands, such as super-popular
No Age or less-popular-but-still-well-regarded
The Raveonettes, who use “noise” to achieve certain effect, you’re just noisy because you’re pissed. You sound like teenagers. To again compare you to a currently popular/Pitchfork-approved band,
M83 evoke teenagerdom to good effect, but you don’t. There’s a difference between sounding like you have an intelligent perspective on being a teenager (like M83 does) and sounding like you are a bunch of teenagers (you, Converge).
Please, take a step back. You think you’re exciting because you make a wild rumpus. But, wild things though you are, you’re predictable. You’re so predictable, you’re boring. If you could say something new, or say something old in a new way, you’d be exciting. Instead, you try to shock me. Guess what. I’m not shocked. If you could try an interesting approach, maybe the rest of us would be as interested as the critical body that feels obligated to find something worthwhile in you just because it’s cool to like harsh music. I’ll wait while you try to figure this out.
Blind Guardian
