Jane Doe [Original recording reissued]

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.