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In 2020, Rundle and Thou joined forces to release May Our Chambers Be Full, an LP that was much more than the sum of its parts. Doom-folk singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle and sludge wanderers Thou - a similar combination of dark, rapturous solo artist and feral heavy-music institution - also first came together for a Roadburn Festival collaboration. Stylistically and conceptually, Bloodmoon: I has a lot in common with an album that came out last year. The pandemic interrupted things, but Converge, working with Wolfe and Chisholm and Brodsky, finished Bloodmoon: I while recording remotely. Finally, late in 2019, everyone got together at Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou’s God City studio in Massachusetts and started to work. Everyone liked how the shows went, and everyone wanted to record together when they all had time. Stephen Brodsky had been in a couple of pre- Jane Doe Converge lineups, and Converge and Cave In had always been closely interlinked with one another. That tour started because Converge and Chelsea Wolfe were mutual fans and because a festival like Roadburn encourages that sort of stylistic departure. These sets focused on the latter, and they made these songs slower and more majestic still. Converge have long split themselves between frantic frag-grenade attacks and slow, majestic doom thunder. As a group, this new version of Converge played new versions of older Converge songs, and they also covered the Cure’s “Disintegration.” These shows were not hardcore shows. On that trip, the brought in doom-goth wailer Chelsea Wolfe, Wolfe’s main collaborator Ben Chisholm, and Cave In frontman Stephen Brodsky. It’s a complete revision of what Converge even is.īloodmoon: I has its roots in 2016, when Converge toured Europe and played the Dutch festival Roadburn with an expanded lineup. But Bloodmoon: I isn’t a Converge record with guest appearances. On Axe To Fall, members of bands like Cave In, Genghis Tron, Neurosis, Blacklisted, and Entombed added layers of heft to an already-dense sound. 2009’s Axe To Fall, for instance, remains my favorite Converge album, and that’s partly because of all the members of the heavy-music world who came in to make that record sound monumental. This isn’t Converge’s first time welcoming help from outside. On Bloodmoon, though, the band has expanded its ranks to include some prominent collaborators. Converge itself has had the same four-man lineup since around the time that Jane Doe hit record stores. Officially, Bloodmoon: I is a Converge album, but it’s really something else. Their new album steers right into that mystery, to beautiful effect. But in the right circumstances, they can still come across like wraiths moving in darkness. They’ve got side projects and side hustles and grown-up lives. (It probably also helped that Bannon looked like a neck-tatted pterodactyl.) These days, the members of Converge are middle-aged dad types. And yet Converge themselves always seemed somehow apart from all that - a fog-shrouded unit with unearthly gifts for off-kilter stop-start mayhem and nerve-jangled atmosphere. Converge come from hardcore, a musical ethos that holds the musicians on equal footing with the people who come to see them play. (In a statement, Bannon confirmed that Marnay’s image had been “definitely one of the sources” for the cover and that “the original goal was to create ghost-like forms that embodied the concept of ‘Jane Doe.'”) I liked the cover better when I didn’t know anything about it.įor decades, Converge have thrived on that sort of mystery, and mystery has helped make them into cult heroes. Converge singer and graphic designer Jacob Bannon had used her image in a cut-and-paste collage. The woman was a model named Audrey Marnay, who’d posed for the cover of the Italian version of Marie Claire in 2001. Who was this lady with the statuesque cheekbones and the defiant stare? Was she the subject of the album’s tortured howls? Was she a real person at all?Īs with so many things, the answer turned out to be fairly uninteresting. Ever since Converge first brought Jane Doe into the world in 2001, that cover art has been a source of fascination. Last month, shortly after the 20th anniversary of Converge’s heavy-music landmark Jane Doe, the world finally learned the identity of the lady on that album cover.