ALBUM REVIEW: Hum Of Hurt – Converge
Earlier this year, CONVERGE broke their solo studio album silence of nine years with the release of Love Is Not Enough, a continuation of the band’s remarkably consistent streak of winning metalcore records. It’s classic CONVERGE – pummeling riffs, frantic drumming and riffage, and caustic vocals coming together in a precisely-engineered prism of emotional aggression. Their follow up, Hum Of Hurt, comes less than four months later, but acts as an apt counterpart for its sister record. CONVERGE have always indulged in slower, sludgier, more formless songs on all of their records, and we see this side of their writing fully realised on Hum Of Hurt. Where Love Is Not Enough shrieks and careens from song to song, Hum Of Hurt seethes and distorts itself into new shapes.
That’s not to say that Hum completely eschews the CONVERGE standards of sub two-minute bruisers with sharp guitar and guttural bellowing like Slip The Noose and It Only Gets Worse. But, for much of the record, the band pushes these ideas into strange corners and come back with some of their most abstract compositions yet. Doom In Bloom’s massive main riff pairs with barked refrains to create a surprisingly catchy chorus, but the verses are filled with tense drumbeats holding down fractured smatterings of guitar and bass. The uneasiness is offset by the massively anthemic chorus, but is not erased entirely. This is but one of many songs on the album that carries a sort of anxious undercurrent beneath the moments of all-out audial assault. It is fitting, since the band based the concept of Hum Of Hurt around the real-life “Hum”, a mysterious frequency that appears in certain parts of the world and causes those in its range psychic and physical distress. It is admirable on the band’s part to so aptly reflect this unsettling phenomenon sonically, and this “all is not well” feeling acts as a mirror to the present-day chaos of the world. Given some of the lyrics on this record’s closing track, Nothing Is Over,“bureaucracy aims to cull and incite / theocracy seeks to enslave the mind / technology, it’s deceiving our eyes / autonomy is the fight for our lives”, as well as lines across the rest of the album and its sister record, it’s clear that CONVERGE are, too, concerned with the powers that be and the direction the world is turning.
I Won’t Let You Go at first presents itself as the typical mosh-inciting frenzy the band so typically and fervently ignites, but evolves into something more desperate and pleading as it progresses, with the clamouring guitars and drums underscoring vocalist Jacob Bannon’s repeated cries to, “please just don’t let me go / please just don’t give up hope”. Detonator similarly sees its raging disrupted by breaks of feedback squalls and cavernous space, with Bannon’s throaty bark receding into a pained shout that sounds more terrified than monstrous. These songs build on the aforementioned thesis of an undercurrent of unease, but again can be extrapolated to mean more, a fierce resistance to cultural regression pinned down by a yawning chasm of fear that things are going to go further downhill. No track feels quite as fittingly pessimistic as Dream Debris, whose militaristic drum march remains a constant throughout the song, anchored by a churning baseline and tightly-played guitar chugs. The song feels funerary despite its clamour, a hopeless march into oblivion as the world plunges into untold chaos.
However, CONVERGE are not content to wallow in doomerisms, and despite the horrifying scale of modern-day existentialism, the record ends on a note of resolve. The title track pairs mournfully melodic riffs and strained clean vocals against swaths of harmonic guitars lamenting the world’s cruelty, with Bannon groaning of “running uphill” and “swimming upstream”, but Nothing Is Over, for all of its grim finality, urges the listener to “get up now, nothing’s over” and crucially, “we must rage for the dying light”. The song still feels grim, panicked, and pessimistic, but the spirit beneath it is a call to revolt, not of resigned acceptance. It’s a glimmer of light at the end of a record so immersed in its own shadows, a flicker of the stars behind the clouded horizon. CONVERGE are aware of how much of a mess we are in, but they know that fighting back is the only way through.
When a band makes a record that becomes such a genre-landmark as Jane Doe, there is always a shadow cast across the rest of their discography that many bands falter under or try hopelessly to recreate. However, CONVERGE have continued to forge new pathways for themselves, not content to call it quits or try the same thing twice. They continue to reshape metalcore for themselves, and we can only hope that we will see their latest iterations continue to be this high quality down the road.
Rating: 8/10
Hum Of Hurt is out now via Deathwish/Epitaph Records.
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