Track Listing

1. Concubine
2. Fault And Fracture
3. Distance And Meaning
4. Hell To Pay
5. Homewrecker
6. Broken Vow
7. Bitter And Then Some
8. Heaven In Her Arms
9. Phoenix In Flight
10. Phoenix In Flames
11. Thaw
12. Jane Doe

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10219 in Music
• Released on: 2001-09-10
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Original recording reissued
• Dimensions: .27 pounds

Customer Reviews

the true art in hardcore - Artcore?
the first time you finish listening to converge's jane doe you will exhale for what feels like the first time in 45 minutes.
it is brutal, it is sublime, it is the single most passionate hardcore cd i've ever heard. it will make your ears bleed - in the best possible way. there's awesome stuff here from the blistering speed of distance and meaning, to the fury of phoenix in flight and the almost soothing hell to pay.
but the epic title track is for me the stand out song and it contains elements that sum up this cd: complex guitar movements weaving together the raw and the smooth, scrunchy basslines and punctuation drumming ... stoked up by the alternately hard and soft searing screams of singer/genius jacob bannon; and one of the most haunting finales i've ever heard - its 11 and a half minutes of bruising beauty. be generous with the volume controls - your neighbours will hate you but hey that's ok ...
yes, it's hardcore and not for everyone. but even if you don't usually go for this type of music, don't please dismiss jane doe. there's something alot more here that goes very deep, and the more more you listen the more you get it.
by the way the lyrics are pure poetry - you won't be able to hear many of them and their reproduction in the cool cd booklet is fractured and artistic.

"I felt the greatest of winters coming.."
What never ceases to amaze me about Jone Doe by Converge is it's ability to impress and attract the attention of people other than fans of extremem music. Even though it is extreme music to an unparralelled degree, this album seems to impress a most broad cross-section of music lovers. I have shown it to fans of metal who've been suitably bowled over, I've shown it to fans of technical and classical guitar music and they've loved it, and I've shown it to fans of indie and they've liked it too. I think that it's because it stands out as something more than just another heavy record - it stands out as a work of art that holds the flag for it's genre, in the same way that Dostoyevsky's The Idiot did for modernist writing and that Casablanca did for the screenplay.

Compared to their earlier albums, Jane Doe is a positively scar-inducing experience. The production here is at first deceptively messy and grating, but soon reveals itself as being a pinpoint balance between extreme cold mathcore and human warmth experimentation, and the individually recorded instruments are powerful beyond expectation. Kurt Ballou's guitarwork here is all over the place in it's ferocious energy, and the coils of Nate Newton's bass strings are time bombs of thumping power. Ben Koller's drums are so over-produced that they sound like The Velvet Goldmine destroying a drumkit with grenades, and Jake Bannon's vocals are matched only in their anger and confusion by that of a new born baby screaming life into their fluid-filled lungs.

The first two tracks are comapnions to each other, and lead into themselves with breathless fury. Jake's vocals never let up, and the beauty of his lyrics is at first sadly lost in the affray of nightmarish music it's supposed to be on top of, but they soon become a macabre instrument in their own right.

The album doesn't even remotely let the listener pause for breath until we get to Hell To Pay, where the over the top bile of the band is swapped for this panting, haunting crawler. But even this has jarring guitar riffs that can lacerate the inside of your ears at the wrong volume, and then throw you straight back in the deep end with Homewrecker - the first of several 'punk' speed tracks on the album. Even though Converge can easily prove that they can do 'math'rock, they don't saturate the notion with patternless self-indulgence like so many bands tend to. The band always seem keen to prove that they never forget their roots.

Heaven In Her Arms is a technical piece worth noting here. There is a confusing emotion brought forward with tracks like this, with their frenetic and complex musicianship which ensures us that when we think we've got the band pinned down, they run off into the darkness ahead of us all over again. Next two tracks, Phoenix In Flight and Phoenix In Flames, are a coupled pair of songs that begin as an ancient temple of animalistic fury that turns into a minimalist drum work-out and vocal punishment, before deceptively ploughing into Thaw -possibly the greatest song on the album. Thaw is a nasty, unpredictable horror movie of a track that encapsulates the mood of the record perfectly. Final track, Jane Doe, is an ending that feels more like hospitalisation due to paralysis rather than resolution.

What must also be pointed out here is the truly astounding artwotk by Jake Bannon himself. Full of haunting and inexplainably disturbing silhouettes of women's pouting faces intertwined with his classically poetic (if a little hard to read) lyrics, the sleeve here provides an unexpected air of ghostly gentleness to the record, which isn't on previous Converge releases, as they tended to have much more shock-value styled album art. Converge even dropped the 'scratchy' logo that they had used for the previous releases and instead opted for a straight forward, simplistic font. This really is a labour of love from Converge. A visualised and achieved work of beauty in the guise of nihilistic, bitter metal that transcends so many styles of music because it was never planned to be categorised - just realised.

More than just a 'hardcore' album
From start to finish, this album is incredible. It is a true journey that surpasses the usual expectations and boundaries of extreme music, and as the title of my review suggests, it is more than a regular hardcore or metal album. Both styles have obviously influenced Converge heavily, and their earlier work does lean more towards a more typical hardcore style, but Jane Doe has a sound of it's own.

The opening track is short, fast paced, and like getting kicked in the face. The closing track is long, slow and thoroughly crushing, and builds up to a cataclysmic climax after nine minutes. The first time I listened to it, I found it quite hard to listen to, as the music is very dense and hard to digest (although incredibly executed), but after repeated listens I can finally comprehend it. The vocals on this album range from incoherent screeching to haunting melodies buried deep in the noise. It's bleak, and brutal. All in all Converge have created a masterpiece of extreme music, and is accompanied by fantastic inlay artwork from vocalist Jake Bannon. A truely solid album.