Review
Converge
Beautiful Ruin

Converge—Nietzsche’s pissed off nephew, Rilke’s furious friend—achieves a glimmering consummation in a mishmash of fourness (which, in numerology, symbolizes spiritual wholeness). They went from thrash titans to sonic gods; now they flirt with the nasty nebula they came from, dumping what we might consider B-sides, smacking a healthy appetite, and a bitter jaded cheek, awake. Seemingly, they can do no wrong!

The “Permanent Blue” infects, and feeds off tears. It is a machine, polluting our dreams, and poisoning our God in the deepest delirium: a synthetic everything thought to answer the weakened (grounded) Angels, useless in contemplation. And among the viscose polluted muck, infecting paradise, a weak will means drowning in quicksand where, ‘we…keep losing what small strength we have, like swimmers.’

O my wonderful moody boyfriend Nietszche once said of Christianity ‘[e]nlightenment infuriates: the slave wants the unconditional, he understands only the tyrannical, even in morality, he loves as he hates without nuance, to the depths, to the point of pain, to the point of illness.’ After the good man in the sky came crashing down, a bleak root like a malignant tumor burst through the floor of the chapel the same time a chandelier fell in the justice hall on top of an innocent skull. I plead, ‘[w]ho…would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?’

Instead I think, ‘”how dear you will be to me then,” you demi-gods of thrash. Pull me up by the hair from the murky depths that you created, and let me “lose myself in your loosened hair.’ To which Jacob Bannon replies, ‘”how we squander out hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are our winter enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, one season in our inner year…”’ 

Drummer Ben Koller walks into view: Jacob goes on, ‘“in the end what do all the swamps of the sick, wicked world matter… if someone has feet of wind, like him, the force, breath and liberating scorn of a wind that makes everything healthy by making everything run!”’ 

Before I knew it their tempo woke me to the ‘power and art of flying…as [my] very own enviable happiness.’ I knew ‘the feeling of a certain divine levity…[an] “upward” without tension and compulsion, a “downward” without condescension and degradation’ even though it was over in 6 minutes and 42 seconds. 

And so, ‘God can be refuted, but not the devil.’ Because of this unfortunate fact, Converge doesn’t ‘swallow the call-note of [their] dark sobbing,” they blow it like a hot furnace, browning the fields in furious anger, just so we can believe in something. 

If anything, Converge built a b-side cup, and poured in 4 great song ingredients of ‘thrash, stomp, and repeat’. On a larger scale they built a little village and populated it with golden albums and silver ep’s: Beautiful Ruin’s ‘place and settlement, foundation and soil and home’.