This is a brand new category for the Fowries — brand new for several reasons. In years’ past, John and I weren’t the best at seeing the ins and outs of metal and there wasn’t enough interest in listening to enough of it anyway. Our current worlds were Mastodon, Opeth, the little gem, and that was it. 2012 was also the year Metal Dan was in full swing of writing reviews, more than John or I ever wrote, but his presence wasn’t even the huge assistance in having a metal category. It just so turned out that metal was great in 2012 — great and various, from the traditional yet rugged doom offering from Pallbearer, Converge’s true assertion of metalcore, Black Breath’s and Horrendous’s takes on modern and classic death metal, and the melting black metal riffage of Mgla. There was, however, one band in particular that grabbed all of us with a fucking chokehold.
“All We Love We Leave Behind” by Converge is a record that’s tough to find. The genre that it is placed under, metalcore, has a pretty depressive history and it seems like the one of the only artists that’s managed to find any real basis for its existence is Converge. It isn’t like Converge is coming out of nowhere though, they are a highly regarded group, but what makes this record so special? Its precision and relentlessness. There are no dull moments on this album, even a song titled “A Glacial Pace” moves more dynamically than your average metalcore track, which is a problem with a lot of metalcore artists chasing after Converge’s belt. They’re the most musically creative and easy to palate out of their peers, making their records that much more interesting, but even “All We Love We Leave Behind” stands up with the best of the band’s discography like “Jane Doe”. It’s also the first metalcore record I can show to a friend and be as willing showing them an album by any hard rock artist. It’s viscera that just makes sense.
Fermata over Whole Rest 