Converge - No Heroes

Like all of Converge's albums I've found this to be extremely under rated, however, this one in particular. It's gotten shit from a lot of people, typical emo fags, typical people fags, and strangely enough, a lot of metal heads. They consider it to merely be noise. That, however, is BULLSHIT. Although a few more songs are lot more hectic then even usual Converge, you do get calm moments, and very catchy bits. After all, that is the whole point of mathcore. A very good example of this would be the song “No Heroes”. Having been on Youtube and seen the comments I found on the music video, I can tell you it's depressing how many musically ignorant people there are in the world. But still the song, upon my first listening it was actually kind of boring...it was just kind of...mediocre. BUT, having listened to the whole thing through a couple more times, I can safely say, it's an AMAZING song.

Still taking an even more mathcore based approach to their music, their song lengths range from 58 seconds to 9 minutes and 34 seconds, just as mathcore should be. The short songs are usually the more chaotic songs, while the long songs are a bit repetitive (listen to “Plagues”) however amongst the repetitiveness there's usually some FUCKING EPIC bit. Some people also thought they would hear Jacob Bannon's (lead vocalist) clean vocals again, as they did in Jane Doe. Well. THEY WERE MOTHERFUCKING RIGHT. Personally I think that's a good thing, as it made some songs feel a bit daunting and weirder. However, there's a large chance you wouldn't like his clean vocals, they are a bit....unique after all. However, you may notice a difference in the song “Grim Heart/Black Rose” in the vocals...well that's because they got a guest singer, Jonah Jenkins (the vocalist from the band “Only Living Witness”). Still, the screaming is as good as ever, Jacob Bannon's impossibly monstrous voice has definitely managed to stand the test of that dick, time.

This album is a lot heavier, yet also a lot softer then previous albums (if that makes sense to you), so i'm really quite interested to see which direction they take with their next album. Whether you should buy this or not, is quite an easy question. Although yes, this is DEFINITLY A FUCKING AWESOME ALBUM, it is a very acquired taste, and the likes of mere mortals (people into softer metal, such as Metallica) shouldn't bother, however those who like mathcore, extreme hardcore, or someone who's simply looking for a crazy new album, are definitely in the right place.