Converge - Beautiful Ruin

From Sleep and Wreck and Reference to Code Orange, and now, a week later, Converge, a theme of these past few months has been surprise albums, particularly short EPs. While I’m happy to hear some more Converge already after last year’s The Dusk in Us, this little EP sounds about as whimsical as its release was. I know Jacob Bannon had attested that some of the, in his mind, worst material from the recording sessions for their 2017 full-length is what made it onto the album and that he was hoping to release some of the better songs from those sessions in some format. But the four songs on here just sound like unfinished work released on a whim, not because they’re short; the band has plenty of songs of similar length throughout their catalog, including their last album. The songs just sound like they aren’t fully expanded upon in each second of their run time like most other Converge songs are. The songs each constitute a solid chasis upon which Converge might continue to build their ideas, but they really provide little more beyond a representation of the basics of the band’s sound.

The first song, “Permanent Blue” is the longest of the bunch at two and a half minutes and very quintessentially captures Converge’s sonic ethos, but its main guitar line doesn’t really take it anywhere beyond that to me at least. The second song, “Churches and Jails” picks up the pace and tilts much more to the hardcore punk side of the band’s sound, and the following track, “Melancholia” takes a similar hardcore slant with a bit sludgier of a metallic backbone and some wily harmonics thrown in (almost out of sheer mandate alone though). The closing title track returns more to the center of the band’s patented 1st wave metalcore fusion and with a riff near the end that I wish could have been expanded on.

It’s a pretty skeletal release, and at just under seven minutes, it’s a hard one to justify complaining about considering its very existence only became public two days ago. Though it kind of summarizes what Converge is about for the most part, I think it does so incompletely. I think a more sufficient picture of the band’s essence (though hard to really capture) would exhibit their full potential with the short song format and probably still expand some of these ideas into something larger and longer.