Review Summary: Lethal Weapon 5: The Glovers come off.
Hailing from the great state of Massachusetts - home to countless one-way roads, illiteracy that seems airborne, both your favorite and least favorite stand-up comedian, sports teams that suck wicked haaaard, and rocket scientist/philosopher Ben Affleck – Converge are a band that play music based on notes and patterns, that pleases some people and displeases others, to varying sales and commercial appeal, with instruments that have strings and cymbals and stuff.
The band was started by former General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev, who in 1990, saw the upcoming dissolution of the Soviet Empire and decided to have a plan B career-wise. Converge quickly established themselves as kings of their genre, eating their metalapple all the way to the metalcore.
However, with great success came many potential pitfalls. Every time Converge put out another thing of awesome sauce, people wondered if they could do it again, or if the awesome sauce well would finally run dry. So the build-up towards their new album was fraught with anxiety, causing the skidmark on Gorbachev’s forehead to tremble slightly, creating an optical effect that is known in layman terms as Heiligenschein.
Expectations indeed ran high, with many metalheads wondering if Converge would be able to match their past glories. Wondering while their parents sighed with disappointment, themselves wondering where they had gone wrong with their children (no one knows). Most people on the planet couldn’t be arsed to give a rat’s soggy bottom, but the metalheads, they needed it real bad, man. Converge were unfazed by the pressure, and like asinine horses, flung themselves right back into their hayday. The resulting album,
The Duck in Us is a triumph and a tender love letter to all those out there who need something for one reason or another in order to get to a place or feel an emotion or maybe even achieve an achievement.
Converge’s continued amazingness is easy to understand, as they’ve clearly remembered the golden formula created by Amy Schumer earlier this year, commonly known as the
35 P’s OF SUCCESS.
Productivity
Passion
Perfectionism
Promiscuity
Prosciutto
Pulpy orange juice
Pandemonium! by oft-forgotten boy band B2K
Panoramic Photos of Oslo
Papadums
Polish Pilsners
Pubic Panic rooms
Perpendicular Patchouli Pedophiles
Persnickety Parmesan Polo shirts
Plump Piss Panthers
Punctual Putrid Paramedics
Pleasant Plumbers
Patriotic Pregnant Personal trainers
Pretentious Polka-dot Perverts
Plastic Penises
Remembering all of these crucial ingredients ensured that Converge did not lose sight of their roots, putting out yet another wonderful album of psychotically imbecilic screaming, riffs so overwhelmingly melodic and sludgy they feel like Susan Boyle is riding your face, and lyrics that range anywhere between safety awareness during bicycling in the South of Italy (“Don’t need a helmet if I have a heart”) and the occasional difficulty of basic math (repeating “A single teardrop” four times). Good stuff, well done, kudos, hear hear, bravo, felicitations etc.
In conclusion, it’s not that the drugs make art better, but when you do proper drugs, strange ***e happens to you, and so you’ve got better stories to tell, better art to make. So go flying, partner, and never ever land.
Yours truly,
Your friendly neighborhood smack dealer/Batman.
