HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: You Fail Me – Converge

There are tough acts to follow and then there’s Jane Doe by CONVERGE. The Massachusetts legends’ fourth full-length will always be their magnum opus, widely and fairly regarded as the greatest metalcore record of all time, and the kind of album most bands would have been content to coast on for decades. But, of course, CONVERGE are not ‘most bands’; three years later – or realistically slightly less given the time it takes to put these things together – they had one goal for the follow-up: “to write an album that moved us and challenged us.” 

Those are the words of the band’s inimitable, larynx-shredding frontman Jacob Bannon, shared with Creative Eclipse shortly after the fruits of their labour had emerged, his subsequent assertion of “we feel we accomplished that” still underselling a record that achieved something few bands ever do. You Fail Me is the masterpiece that followed the masterpiece, an album that could well be considered an equal to its towering predecessor on its day, and crucially its own distinct and visceral entity, determined not only to stand on its own two feet but to put those feet one after the other and walk forward.

Difficult though it may be to believe that they were ever anything but, CONVERGE had become a ridiculously well-oiled machine by the time they entered guitarist Kurt Ballou’s hallowed GodCity Studio to record You Fail Me. By this point they had cemented their definitive and lasting line-up of Ballou, Bannon, drummer Ben Koller and bassist Nate Newton – second guitarist Aaron Dalbec having departed to focus on his commitments to BANE almost immediately after the release of Jane Doe – and they’d spent the intervening years writing most of the album in soundchecks on the road, tweaking and testing the material in a live setting long before it was committed to tape.

“I feel like the way we play our instruments on You Fail Me is very true to how we still play,” explained Ballou in a 2016 interview with Vice to promote the release of a remixed and remastered version of the record. “It reminded me of how much we played between those two records and how much we developed and became a much more cohesive unit in that time period. We went from a band that conceptually was good and played pretty well to being a band that was really, really tight and cohesive on You Fail Me.”

Again, it would be a stretch to suggest that CONVERGE hadn’t ‘found their groove’ before then, but no doubt it was this increased confidence and cohesion that led them to produce what Pitchfork described in typically pretentious though not entirely inaccurate fashion as their “first capital-A album”. You Fail Me is more dynamic and carefully paced than Jane Doe, and indeed than any of their efforts before that. Where previous albums had started with the jagged face-ripping of a Concubine or a Saddest Day, for example, this one eases the listener in, the lonely guitarscapes of opener First Light serving only to heighten the cataclysmic power with which its partner Last Light comes thundering in immediately after.

Later, and not before a breathless run of quintessential CONVERGE, You Fail Me arrives at a pair of centrepieces in the form of the title track and In Her Shadow. These two account for a third of the album’s original runtime between them, the former a lumbering, churning post-something behemoth, and the latter all dirgey acoustic guitars and croaky cleans steeped in a moody gothic gloom. That these tracks are placed at the heart of the record and not at the end as the band may have previously been tempted to do is another masterstroke, perfectly timed to sharpen the savagery that resumes with full force in the subsequent Eagles Become Vultures and prevails all the way through to Hanging Moon’s deranged and cacophonous close.

All this, of course, soundtracks what feels like another borderline exorcism for Bannon. “When [Jane Doe] was released I didn’t feel any better, nothing was changed,” he explained in that same interview we borrowed from at the beginning. “My depression kept collapsing on itself. At that point I stopped hoping and searching and I took a long hard look at my life and at my heart. I did a huge amount of soul searching and found so much failure within myself. That discovery was a massive realization. As I started to see clear again, I also saw the failure in friends and loved ones around me. How we fail each other, and how we fail ourselves. These are songs of failure. And ultimately, surviving self destruction and tragedy we all face in our lives.”

If the vulnerability, poeticism and even occasional hope of the words themselves is often masked by the harshness with which they are delivered, the emotion never is. You Fail Me is one of the finest examples in a truly glittering discography of the way in which CONVERGE never allow artistic ambition or musical virtuosity or even outright extremity to get in the way of writing songs with hearts that beat inside them (how’s that Pitchfork!?). It was this album that confirmed – as if it was even needed at this point – that CONVERGE would never coast, never compromise, and that nothing they would ever create, not even a record of the generational stature of Jane Doe,  would ever cast a shadow that they could not step out of. 

You Fail Me was originally released on September 21st, 2004 via Epitaph Records.

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