Converge: Hum of Hurt
Out Now
Hardcore genii and the hardest working band in showbiz release their second album of the year; its only comparison is its companion piece. Currently touring the EU, this is a near-perfect slab of political mass and yet another contender for Album of the Year. MK Bennett is suitably awed.
Fraternal twins (dizygotic twins) are the most common type of twin. They occur when two separate eggs are released during ovulation and fertilised by two different sperm. Because they come from unique eggs and sperm, they share about 50% of their DNA, making them genetically no different from ordinary siblings. Think of Hum of Hurt and the equally magnificent Love Is Not Enough ( released March of this year and reviewed here ), then, as dizygotic twins, gestated in the same womb or laboratory, same ingredients, same parents but different results. They were out of the gates with a bona fide classic ( Jane Doe, 2001 ) and have rarely let the quality levels drop since. It’s a feat of social engineering and hard-won brilliance that has brought them this far, finally, as the willfully cool like to say, getting their flowers. Two albums in a year have precedence, though it is mostly historical, when record companies treated bands like battery chickens, caged into submission and fed drugs so they wouldn’t notice. Sabbath in 1970 may be the most prescient example for our purposes. The two Sabbath albums were similar in songcraft, but one is an evolution based on the other. They co-exist as exalted art, rightly, but happen in the same ecosystem. Thematically, musically and aesthetically different but the same.
Hum of Hurt is a separate light and shade from its sister album, a rejuvenation of a genre more or less invented by Bad Brains ( Rock For Light came out in ’83 ) that shows no sign of slowing down. In a year of top-class hardcore adjacent releases, there is little to beat the two Converge albums. While there are plenty of issues to be writing about right now, this one seems more personal somehow, more introverted. Borne out by the first song, Slip The Noose, which starts “I see young me in you, so wide-eyed and confused..”, it literally flies out of the traps before the discordant brilliance of the two main riffs fight over control of the central idea. A warning about history repeating, it wears its elder colours lightly but clearly. It sits cosily with Dead Pioneers or Angel Du$t, and it’s a hell of a kick-off. Doom in Bloom follows, a gorgeous rhythmic clash of metals that runs into dysphoria and unrest, the cut glass figures of guitar spitting self-disgust while the anchors slip into contained fury. In what could be a serial killer’s manifesto or the agony of regret, or both, it shifts constantly between the angular metalised steel of Pere Ubu to full-on riffing in a single heartbeat. Two perspectives simultaneously.
The lyrics are bleak and discomfiting, but the music reflects this differently, its ever-moving juggernaut of broken chords and technical perfection in the rhythm section complementing and offsetting the desperation of the words. This is shown in It Only Gets Worse, which moves and retracts gears while your brain is still absorbing the last sequence of ecstatic noise. The shock and awe of the music support and reaffirm the singer’s despair at himself and the world. Detonator is a little slower, a little more poised, ready to strike. Reminiscent of Damaged era Black Flag, it lumbers deliberately, distorted yet tightly focused. Even the feedback sounds purposeful and pointed. Don’t be blown apart by mistakes indeed.
“ The Hum is a persistent and invasive low-frequency humming, rumbling, or droning noise audible to many, but not all, people in an area. The Hum does not appear to be a single phenomenon. Different causes have been attributed, including local mechanical sources, often from industrial plants, as well as manifestations of tinnitus or other biological auditory effects”, at least according to the internet. Using this as social metaphor and symbolism, Converge here use it literally, in the sounds they make and thematically, as an allusion to mental illness and other dysphoria. It is not much of a leap to see this theory as political allegory, with many major Western governments falling to a new Stalinism, albeit right-wing. Everything about this record, from the split screen and possible duality of the cover to the production, serves to represent that theme, and it works magnificently.
I Won’t Let You Go starts (briefly) like House Of Fun by Madness, then significantly deviates into a bass and drum-heavy thrash masterclass, then devolves into pure rhythm before emerging triumphant and exhausted at the end. It manages to somehow strive for both Sepultura and Minor Threat and achieve its goals. The lyrics are a howl of pain from someone unreachable. There’s no catharsis here, only the abyss. The band do a more than admirable job of tracking these emotions and replaying them, which is at least cathartic for the listener, if not the subject. Damaged is again the touchstone here, Rollins the scarecrow in the field. Brutal and beautiful. It’s Not Up To Us is up next, sludge fueled yet fast paced, it is short and inventive, a two minute ode to self-hatred, packed full of wicked time changes and searing basslines.
In some ways it serves as an appetiser for Dream Debris, six minutes of coruscating despair vocally, but a staggering monument to a hypnotic snaking bottom end and the power of an arrangement, as the guitars drop in and out and the influence of Harley Flanagan and Roger Miret pushes through the canvas.
“ When I thought I held your hand,
I know now it was a gun,
It was empty from the start
But a threat to make them run..”
It is the soundtrack to Pettibon’s subconscious, a scrapbook of resistance in the form of art. Avant-garde in metal terms, you can hear Sonic Youth, Neubauten, and the conceptual side of Husker Du’s Warehouse. The album’s centrepiece, it splinters and re-configures, falls apart and reforms, returns to brilliance each time. It Used To Matter is Southern rock routed through hell, a slow-motion Skynyrd and a deep, dark introduction to Hum of Hurt itself. Feedback drenched before a formally traditional metal arrangement that works perfectly with the hardcore instrumentation, it is, like everything here, highly inventive and constantly shifting, whilst “ I’m not the man I wanted to be” nails the whole concept in a single flawless sentence.
Nothing Is Over completes the cycle, a glimpse of hope, a possible resolution. A warning about forces that may try to steal your light, whether technological or theological, “Autonomy is the fight for our lives”, it is another monster riff encased in turmoil and breaking outward. Rage against, fight against, kick against. It is a heartwarming punk rock Braveheart, a pure and untouched force of nature. In a year of great albums, including their own, this is supersonic.
They sit comfortably near the top of any premier league table of meaningful and timely music currently on release. Record after record of perfect metal-focused hardcore, it is the sound of an exploded and exploding America. Breathtaking.
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All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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