Converge “Jane Doe” (Best of the Decade)
These days, it’s very rare for an album to shock me so much that I just “don’t get it,” but it wasn’t always so. The first time my brother brought home the curiously packaged Jane Doe album from Converge (which he’d purchased on a whim after a suggestion on some internet message board), the record tortured my mid-school aged groove-metal loving mind for weeks on end. While the album blasted away from his bedroom, I’d pound on the wall, kindly requesting he turn down “that fucking garbage.” Having always respected his tastes in the past, I couldn’t understand why he’d turned over his stereo to this mangled mess of noise for so many hours on end. I decided I had to find out for myself. And so, as I dared on that day, I played Jane Doe through my headphones to see what all the fuss was about.
To this day, the one-two punch of “Concubine” and “Fault and Fracture” catches me by surprise. A thunderstorm of blastbeats rain down, dodging through various chaotic stop-start rhythmic changes while guitars riffs blaze off at whiplash inducing speeds; the blood-curdling delivery of the vocalist is about as unsettling as anything in imagination. And it hit me immediately; this band makes Slipknot look like Vanilla Ice.
No two songs on Jane Doe sound alike; from the towering, thick grooves of “Hell to Pay” to the impassioned, anthemic rage of “The Broken Vow” to the unhinged madness of “Paris in Flames” to the enchanting “Jane Doe” that ends the album, it’s a diverse record that turns its nose up at every previous trend. On Jane Doe, Converge seems to be bleeding a sort of Slayer & grind infused hardcore straight from their veins dirctly to the aural canvas; itâ’s a beautifully raw and crisp experience, and in the new millennium, this is the closest it comes to punk rock.
For the uninitiated it can be a hard album to digest, but once you wrap your head around Jane Doe she will creep into your soul and never let go.
I bought this record when it was pretty new never even hearing the band before, just knowing it as something I might be into. The moment where the record kicks in and the vocals come in as a high pitched screech were a pretty shocking moment to someone who had no idea what the record was going to sound like except it being a heavy band. After the initial shock wore off, this became a favorite record of mine for quite some time.
Saw them back a few years ago with Mastodon and they were crazy… didn’t listen to them much before, but since momentum on the new album has been building I’ve been getting into them–definitely looking forward to it, that “Saw”-like video was awesome.
This album is an absolute classic. It took some time for it to truly sink in, but once it did it never left. The songs are just brutal, and as a whole piece it is unlike anything else. Truly amazing stuff. Can’t wait to see them with Mastodon again!