#31: Converge - You Fail Me

Yup, it's Converge. Released in 2004, three years after Jane Doe, the band's greatest work to date, You Fail Me sounds like a band that's gone a few separate ways in the past, and is trying to put them all together.

Whereas the band's earlier records, When Forever Comes Crashing and Petitioning the Empty Sky, were nonstop ragers that didn't slow down for anyone or anything, Jane Doe stretched things out and experimented with longer songs, additional textures, and dashes of melody beneath the chaos. With You Fail Me, it feels like the band is trying to put all that together, and while it works, the amalgam isn't quite as compelling as sticking to one path and riding it out for the duration of a record.

The opening tracks, "First Light" and "Last Light," brought back memories of Jane Doe's two-part song, "Phoenix in Flight"/"Phoenix in Flames," but the excitement when the heaviness comes in on the second track isn't as warranting of furniture destruction as it was when they did it the first time. For the most part, the songs are tighter, with most clocking in between two and three minutes, save for a few exceptions. In the spirit of the eleven-minute title track on Jane Doe, the tracks "You Fail Me" and "In Her Shadow" are presented back-to-back here, and roughly add up to the same amount of time. The pair is the album's high point, especially the reductionist, 'so stupid only a genius could write it' guitar intro to the title track, and the appropriately-damaged acoustic guitar that opens "In Her Shadow."

One reason I like Converge is one of the same reasons I like Sigur Ros. On every album, there's always one absolutely jaw-dropping part, whether due to stunning orchestration or unfathomable brutality (guess which goes with which). That part doesn't seem to come here - perhaps it's still waiting to reveal itself, but so far, there's nothing like the gut-wrenching crescendo in "Jane Doe" or the exposed agony of "Grim Heart/Black Rose" on No Heroes, the successor to this record.

Actually, No Heroes, which would be released two years later, is where the band finally figured out what they were going for with You Fail Me. There's the aforementioned emotional centerpiece of "Grim Heart/Black Rose," but then it's surrounded by thirteen pummeling tracks, most of which barely scratch the two-minute mark. It's a dynamic the band was trying to capture here, but on You Fail Me, it's as if they were trying to patch it together with a glue stick rather than cement.

"Eagles Become Vultures" - why they wanted to add a minute of nothing to the beginning of a two-minute song, I'll never understand



"You Fail Me" live



And for fun, a brawl that broke out on the Jane Doe tour