Converge
 

so the other day i did this thing on last.fm where i wrote naming negative things about my top 50 artists. i wrote, concerning converge, that when forever comes crashing seemed kinda weak and it's production wasn't very good, my appreciation from the last time i listened to it (admittedly, it's the 'verge album i have listened to the least, not counting caring and killing which i haven't listened to at all). some user made a comment saying that he thought wfcc was probably their best so, i decided to give it a fresh listen and boi was i wrong! it's so amazing in every aspect, then i relistened to petitioning and was floored again, so i decided to make a thread to ask you what's you favorite verge album.

beside, this great great band deserves a thread of their own. so let's talk converge.

jane doe is their masterpiece, and i love petitioning the empty sky.

their a hard band to classift, "metalcore" would be the easiest, but they have elements of hardcore, thrash, mathcore ala dillinger escape plan, and very little little hints of noise.

as ive said before, im personally acquainted with jacob bannon as my parents' friends daughters has been engaged to him for quite some time, he is a verrrrry mellow, nice guy.

petitioning the empty sky is my favorite then when forever comes crashing. jane doe was the last thing i listened to by them and it was good. i haven't listened to them since 2003 maybe.

i think caring and killing is some pretty awful shit. stephen brodsky played bass on when forever comes crashing.

I love them but for some reason No Heroes is the only album I know really well, so I voted this one. It's incredible, I love how they destroy you with the first titles, then do that ambient track, then destroy you again, and then experiment for the rest of the album

I went with "Petitioning". Any album with the saddest day and dead on it win in my book. All there stuff's good, maybe You Fail Me being a bit lesser than the others, but I'd like to say that the drumming on the second song on Jane Doe is probably the best drumming of all time.

jane doe, you fail me second

I only own No Heroes. It rules :)

thinking about it, they are masters of the opening song.

"the saddest day", "concubine", "downpour", they always start with a bulldozer. except for you fail me which starts kinda mellow.

when i saw them live, they started their set with "the saddest day". it was massive.

every time i saw them they started with the saddest day. it pumps up all the kids in the pit. i think that song is their best one.

i've only seen them once, at a festival, i went to the festival especially to see converge, though. and the crowd was more confused by them than anything, i thought it was going to get rough with the slamming but i was right in the front and pretty much nobody moved.

they were so good and intense, it felt like they only played for 15 minutes instead of 40.

they are CONSTANTLY amazing live. they have gotten so fucking good at playing with eachother at this time (hehe, playing with eachother) that they could easily be one of the best live bands on the planet. just saw them in pheonix with the red chord and genghis tron and the of course blew minds and the opening bands off the stage, outta the arena, and outta the fuckin city.

the last time i saw them was at the last gainesville fest (not the fest that put on by no idea records. this was more of a metalcore/emo/hardcore fest) and a little riot went on during converge's set. i think the video is on youtube somewhere.

so genghis tron weren't all that?

nah, pretty boring actually. i bought their newest record, listened to it once and filed it away.

I dunno if I've said this anywhere else on here, but I absolutely HATE Genghis Tron. You pretty much hit it on the head: they're extremely boring. Lots of people might find their music "adventerous" but it's just Fruity Loops keyboards/drums with some boring grinding parts over top. Some occassional good drum programming aside, there's not much to reccomend. One of the more overrated bands of late.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bNF08roKQro

there's the fight for anyone who hasn't seen it. around the 2:30 mark it starts. check out the using the bass as a weapon. i'm sure that didn't feel good.

i'm in the minority when i say i like board up the house, it's certainly mellower and more ambient but i enjoy; it's not as cohesive as dead mountain mouth but i enjoy it.

it's just an ok-to-good album, sometimes i'm boggled by how people disregard albums just because they are not almost perfect; i myself get caugh up in that but still.

anyhoo, in short i do like genghis tron, not my favorite band and not by a chance in the same league as converge but still a good band.

I never heard the new one, but their EP had one decent song (the last one) and their full length was just mindlessly boring. I appreciate the concept but I kind of lump them with stuff like Horse the Band... interesting but just kind of a novelty... ideas over substance.

i think genghis tron would be better as just an electronic band than a cyber-grind band. they sound so tame compared to most of those bands.

Yeah, exactly, I don't like that genre at all, but the few serious bands I do like in that genre (Iron Bitchface, Gigantic Brain) just completely blow Genghis Tron away.

close one between Jane Doe and No Heroes. I went with Jane Doe

You know what's really cool about jane doe?

Theremin.

u dont like agoraphobic?

i tried to like them for a bit, but i just couldn't get into them.

thats a shame, theyre awesome.

-ï don't think genghis tron are cybergrind, they're like a hardcore metal band with blastbeats and tons of sequences. they might not sound innovative but they write good songs or tracks...actually, they remind me of the prodigy in a weird way.

-gigantic brain, ganglia...that's cybergrind, you listen to them and it's unmistakable grindcore shit played with tons of programming and few guitars, if any. it's hard to explain and i feel like an idiot trying to define cybergrind.

-agoraphobic nosebleed, i like in small doses, i can only listen to like ten songs at once, i get sick of them really fast. that said, their cover of voivod's "forgotten in space" is one of the best covers ever made.

You do raise a good point: Genghis Tron themselves don't identify with cybergrind, but ... their music still IS grindcore type stuff over sequenced/Fruity Loops stuff... and every review/description you read says "grindcore meets pop". I think their first EP, which got me interested, was marketing by their label as "brutal truth meets Erasure" or something. So, I'd definitely lump it in there, though yes, it is a bit.. more metal than grind.

And yeah Agoraphobic Nosebleed wear out pretty quickly. I'd like to mention Gigantic Brain again here, because they have a sound that never gets old to me.

OH, I just checked the wikipedia and I might as well paste, it perfectly sums up our conversation here:

"Genghis Tron is a three-piece experimental metal band formed in Poughkeepsie, NY and currently based out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania currently signed to Relapse Records. Genghis Tron is noted for their creative combination of metal and grindcore with different types of electronic music. Although early on the band was often classified as cybergrind, Genghis Tron has since developed a more diverse sound, which includes elements of IDM, power noise, doom, industrial, ambient, in addition to their core style of synth-laden metal/grindcore."

So, yeah, I tend to agree, their early stuff definitely is cybergrindy (with pop) and Dead Mountain Mouth seemed to move more into extreme metal kind of stuff, and I didn't bother with anything after that.

Oh yeah, and Scissor Shock always gets lumped in with "Cybergrind" too, though we're clearly not. I think it's kind of a just token description for any inhumanly fast, screamy, programmed type stuff.

true, ganglia is amazing. but i fucking love agoraphobic nosebleed. grindcore is pretty much the only extreme metal music that is still breeding tons and tons of creative music. i honestly thing pig destroyer's phantom limb was one of last years top ten best records. death metal is dying pretty hard, the only good black metal is the ambient electronic burzum influenced stuff, like xasthur for example, but grindcore just keep on gettin better.

agreed wholeheartedly.

board up the house is tons more ambient and probably why most people don't like them anymore.

i love how grind is metal by default but it's not really metal yet it's very extreme, i love it.

I go: jane doe

then
no heroes
petitioning the empty sky

mind bogglingly good live.

i love the dirgey moments and (above all) the flow on jane doe.

i didnt much like you fail me at all, no heroes was decent, not great. i think they definitley peaked on jane doe recording wise. live they keep gettin better. they defintiley have a couple great records to be made in them though.

i love you fail me, i loved that they took a left turn in that one and did more "ambient" sort of stuff in it, but it's still hard and there some great songs and riffs in it.

no heroes, it didn't really grab me and in fairness, i haven't given it a lot of listening, though i have heard when forever... even less and now i appreciate it.

Some interesting things about you fail me... the last song on it sounds like if Fugazi covered a Mastodon song or something... listen to it again.. it's pretty funny if you think that. also, the first song reminds me of pink magit by deftones.. probably just the distortion on it and the way it's played...

hehehehe, that's the crunch, that distortion you're talking about; it's basically roled back distortion so it's very saturated but quiet. i used to do that in my former band.

the deftones guitar player had ibanez build him a pedal so he could duplicate the sound in a hurry.

I'm listening to Jane Doe now.

Ah, the fucking headache.

<F8>

Something weird and kinda off topic.

The dude from Deftones has his own specially-made seven string guitars and Dillinger Escape Plan play them (or at least played them on Miss Machine). I always found that kinda odd. Not so much that Dillinger would play 7 strings but would play the custom models originall made for the Deftones guy.

Also, there's an interview on Mark Prindle's page about everyone in Dillinger being big into Incubus.

Okay, back to Converge..

dude from the deftones had also custom made 8 string guitars, i think that's like getting 11 on your amp dials.

my theory on dillinger escape plan: they became senile, maybe all their onstage injuries decreased their hormones or whatever in their bodies and since miss machine, have started going the path of the old. it's like they don't even remember who they used to be. "ire works is our masterpiece, the album we'll be remembered for".

anyhoo, speaking of guitars, i love how kurt ballow plays this really non metal guitars like rickenbacker and danelectroc and yet has one of the heaviest sounds ever.