5 out of 5

Produced by: Kurt Ballou

Label: Epitaph / Deathwish

I owned early Converge albums, but nothing from Jane Doe onward.  When I finally got around to their later stuff, I started with All We Love We Leave Behind, which, despite having some absolute barn-storming, ear-murdering awesomeness, I felt was too stylistically mixed to result in a great album.  I really enjoyed The Dusk In Us, but since then I’ve found myself going back to All We Love, repeatedly.  My ears, perhaps better adapted to Converge, now find that album immensely pleasing, although I can still understand my first-take on it as sort of an all-or-nothing experience.

Axe To Fall, preceding that album, was apparently Converge’s ‘most accessible’ release up ’til that point.  There was some grumbling amongst fans (from some internet browsing) that it wasn’t Converge-y enough due to Ballou’s and crews’ approach of treating the album as a collaborative affair, but I went in fresh – not checking liner notes or reviews – and I gotta say: this sounds like Converge to me.  It’s not like they nabbed remixes by the DFA club or something: we’ve got Cave In, Neurosis folk… these are like-minded chaps and chappas.  I’d allow that the tracks credited solely to Converge are maybe more madcap – opener Dark Horse is an insane flash of breathless thrash – but the title track (with George Hirsch) is an insane beatdown of heft and time changes, and the Cave In-paired effigy is a barrage of impressive noise work.  And accessible?  You gotta love a band’s history that something as madly aggressive as this disc would be considered accessible by comparison.

While time will tell what ends up getting the most rotation from me out of my owned-Converge releases, where Axe can claim to be superior is in its sequencing: purposeful or not, there’s a nice ebb and flow to the disc that gives you hooks and thrash in doses, intercut by slower, sludgier affairs, and then concluding with the slower, somber Cruel Bloom, and the electronic-twinged buildup of closer Wretched World.  Just when your ears are possibly overwhelmed by the math-metal non-stop pummeling, we drop into the slow, hefty march of Worms Will Feed/Rats Will Feast, the punky Wishing Well, and then the metal chugga chugga of Damages, before the album flips back into Slayer-overdrive for a slew of excellent tracks.  This pacing allows for each song to stick out, define itself, and become memorable, which I think took more time on something as up-front noisy as All We Love.  And with Ballou, as ever, in the production chair, the disc can’t help but sound phenomenal, highlighting all the right elements as needed, sounding clean and raw in equal doses.

Axe to Fall may be lacking in the thematic linking that can elevate moments of other Converge albums to great heights, and may indeed be more ‘accessible’ in that it’s rather balanced in the types of thrash metal it offers.  But those don’t have to be negatives: every song stands on its own, equaling an amazingly immersive, energizing experience front to back.