With a career stretching over thirty years, Converge are widely held as scene innovators, their ever-changing take on hardcore seen as an influence on mathcore, post-metal and metalcore. When you take into account the fervent admiration with which most followers affix the band’s seminal Jane Doe (cited in multiple sources as one of the best albums of all time), it’s somewhat remarkable that the band, far from crumbling under the weight of expectation that such accolades so often create, have continued to flourish, expanding upon their sound and even diverging from it entirely.
Which brings us to Bloodmoon I. Featuring an expanded line up that draws in Steven Brodsky (Cave In), Chelsea Wolfe and Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe), Bloodmoon I sees the band building on the foundations laid by the ethereal Bloodmoon sessions of 2016. These, saw the band collaborating with the aforementioned members (along with Neurosis’ Steve Von Till), reinterpreting music from across their catalogue, to considerable acclaim. Here, however, the band present a new vision, and one that is genuinely collaborative. Reminiscent, in part, of the exquisite Mariner (a collaboration between Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas), Bloodmoon I is a genuine meeting of minds, and one that is all the more effective for the haunting melodies woven between the expected shards of blistering hardcore that are found scattered across the album.
It opens with Bloodmoon, a track lost in a wash of hazy vocals and backwards delay, all set to haunting piano. As the delicate vocals are slowly obscured by an increasingly agitated wall of wailing guitars, the listener is reminded of Bee and Flower’s dusty melodies, albeit with a rock-hard post-hardcore underpinning. It leads, of course, to a more dramatic plane and it surely makes for an amazing start to the album. Follow up, the enigmatically-titled Viscera Of Men, is no less engaging, although it is considerably more harrowing. Opening with the juxtaposed vocals of Chelsea Wolfe (delicate, yet defiant) and Jacob Banon (bruising and mercurial), the track is a searing outpouring of acrobatic post-metal, complete with mid-tempo drums and huge, hanging riffs. Emerging from its predecessor’s gorgeous conclusion, Coil opens with a subtle, picked guitar figure topped with semi-whispered vocals, before heading off in a direction that has as much in common with Muse as Mastadon. A multi-hued piece which nods to the grandstanding of Queen and the excesses of mid-period Pumpkins, it’s a genuinely progressive piece of music that benefits greatly from having three vocalists sharing the limelight. The eerie, slow-paced Flower Moon, with its stair-stepping chords and strong focus on Brodsky’s vocals, is closer to Cave In’s stock in trade, recalling the wonderful Perfect Pitch Black. If the densely packed, albeit short, Flower Moon is the album’s straight Cave in moment, the pared back Tongue Playing Dead is Converge’s retort. Built around a cyclical riff and with blistering vocals leading the charge, it serves as a savage palette cleanser, although a calmer mid-section sees the band digress into Tool territory, if only for a moment or two. It leaves the unhinged Lord Of Liars to bring the first half to a close, Chelsea and Jacob going head to head over a torturous melange of stabbing guitars, dazed harmonics and arcing feedback.
With the first half of the album having come to an abrupt end, the gentle introduction to Failure Forever allows for a moment’s respite before things built to a head once more. A mid-paced and ambient piece, the emphasis here is firmly on atmosphere and the understated vocals work really well here, even recalling Placebo at one point. The surprises keep coming with the dusky, countrified Scorpion’s Sting, a track that places Chelsea at the heart of a track that owes a debt to latter day Nick Cave. Beautiful, but not without a subtle sense of lingering threat, it’s a testament to the skills of all involved that the album can head off down such strange pathways without ever feeling inchoate. In contrast, despite a superficially soothing introduction, Daimon hangs off some seriously gnarly riffing, once again hitting that sweet spot between Cave In’s more measured approach and Converge’s harrowing assault. Rising from the gentle acoustic strum of its predecessor, the haunting progression of Crimson Stone evokes genuine heartache over the course of its near-seven-minute runtime. The deftly harmonised vocals recall the tightly coiled beauty of long-lost alt rockers Seafood, the thunderous toms that underpin the piece suggesting a similar tendency to move from fragility to fury on a knife edge. It leaves the somnambulant Blood Dawn to see the album out on a contemplative note that sits somewhere between Kate Bush and P J Harvey in the chain of inspiration. A genuinely beautiful coda to an innovative album, it draws the shades down on a startlingly original project and one that we can only hope the various members decide to revisit at some point in the future.
Bloodmoon I is a truly fantastic piece of work that showcases just what can be achieved when genuinely respectful musicians coalesce around a singular vision. The result is unequivocally a Converge album and yet it is so much more, with each of the collaborative partners bringing their own unique vision to the table. The results are frequently electrifying, offering glimpses of the myriad influences that lie beneath, and the album is majestic in its progressive ebb and flow. One of the albums of the year most assuredly but, perhaps more surprisingly, Bloodmoon I also stands as one of the albums of Converge’s storied career. 9.5/10
