"No Heroes" is an album that sees Converge in a rather precarious position. While the band delivered a genre-defining classic in the form of 2001's "Jane Doe", its follow-up, 2004's "You Fail Me", saw enough artistic shifts to polarize a good portion of the groups fan base. The good news here is that the band have bridged those gaps and have used elements of both the aforementioned albums and their earlier efforts as the construction materials to do so.

An utterly searing listen, the bulk of "No Heroes" finds the band at their most ferocious, spewing out molten aural carnage that lacerates and cauterizes in the same instantance. Manic noise-laden assaults of frenetic riffing, spastic drums, rigid bass lines and rabid screams all terrorize the listener and probably exhaust the band in the process. It's an album full of honest emotion that actually translates throughout almost every note and scream that is splayed out here.

The good thing is, while it does recapture much of the dirge-like nature and intensity of the bands past releases, it by no means rehashes (though it doesn't boldly trail blaze either.) Even the albums most prevalent melodic track, "Grim Heart/Black Rose", which finds uncharacteristically clean vocals and numbing progressive harmonies, eventually erupts into the primal savagery reserved for that of the animal kingdom. Relevant, enthralling and utterly devastating, "No Heroes" is akin to having one play your eardrums with meat hooks in the place of drumsticks - a deafening bloody destructive mess not to be missed or forgotten.