The only surprising thing about this album is that it didn’t get a release on Deathwish. Seriously imagine the sound that members of Converge, The Hope Conspiracy and Bloodhorse would make and have it produced by Kurt Ballou. Imagining it? Good you’ve heard this album.
None of that would be too bad if it wasn’t been done by so many other people. Converge successfully changed the face of hardcore and now not even members of the band can move on to something new, meaning that All Pigs Must Die actually come out of this looking a little behind the times.
They don’t do anything wrong. The album scurries past with all the emotive, discordant malice that you’d expect, and like the last effort they’ve added a faint touch of crust, but nothing really grabs you. Ballou’s production style is so well known now that it never seems as revolutionary as it once was.
Fans of anything Ballou/Deathwish affiliated will find plenty of familiar points of interest here, and it’s bound to go down a storm in the live setting, but this won’t set the world blaze. It won’t become the ultimate, feedback laced, pissed off, sound of the apocalypse album. Hell, after the album The Secret pushed onto the world last year, it isn’t even close to the best Converge rip.
This is ten tracks of the same variations we’ve been hearing since Jane Doe came out; excellently played, perfectly produced and quickly becoming the equivalent of that joke your Dad tells at least once a week.
5/10
Matthew Tilt