Bloodmoon: I Converge and Chelsea Wolfe

• 1 Blood Moon 07:50
• 2 Viscera of Men 05:29
• 3 Coil 06:08
• 4 Flower Moon 04:38
• 5 Tongues Playing Dead 04:12
• 6 Lord of Liars 03:21
• 7 Failure Forever 04:02
• 8 Scorpion's Sting 05:48
• 9 Daimon 06:59
• 10 Crimson Stone 06:47
• 11 Blood Dawn 03:30
• Total Runtime 58:44

Info for Bloodmoon: I

“We wanted to do something grander than the typical four-piece Converge music,” says Converge vocalist Jacob Bannon in reference to the inspiration that eventually bloomed into Bloodmoon: I, the new collaborative album created by the legendary hardcore band alongside dark songstress Chelsea Wolfe, her bandmate/writing partner Ben Chisolm, and Cave In vocalist/guitarist Stephen Brodsky.

The collaboration first began in 2016 at Roadburn festival in The Netherlands where the seven-piece performed revamped Converge material under the name Blood Moon. The energy and rapturously received appearance inspired the group to want to make music together, though it would take several years before their schedules allowed. In late 2019, they were finally able to begin working on new material together at Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou’s God City Studio in Salem, Massachusetts. Future sessions were planned for 2020 but the pandemic would see the remainder of the record be finished remotely.

Produced by Ballou, Bloodmoon: I is a harrowing and atmospheric collaborative effort that sees each performer working together and outside the comfort zones in order to create something that is truly unique to the project. “I feel like everyone just kept the music in mind and wanted to do what’s best for the song,” notes Brodsky.

“The project stretched my vocals in new ways. It’s so different than what I normally sing over that I was able to open up and be vulnerable with my vocals,” says Chelsea Wolfe. “Our dynamics are pushing and pulling in all different directions on this record, and I find that to be creatively rewarding,” adds Bannon.

Chelsea Wolfe, vocals
Converge

Converge
Every Converge album is a milestone in the heavy music community and the band’s latest is the most integral album to date in a catalog that’s celebrated to an almost religious degree by countless fans of punk, metal and hardcore. For the first time in years All We Love We Leave Behind is an album that contains no special guests or outside collaborators and every aspect of the music, production and aesthetics of the album was handled by Converge in order to give listeners an unfiltered glimpse into the creative vision of these Boston-based innovators.

Once again recorded and mixed by guitarist Kurt Ballou at his renowned Godcity Studios in Salem, Massachusetts, All We Love We Leave Behind is a no-frills Converge album that sees the band—which also features vocalist Jacob Bannon, bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller—eschewing fancy production techniques in order to create seventeen songs that work as a cohesive whole yet can also stand on their own. “There’s no artificial distortion, triggers, or Auto-Tune on this album,” Ballou explains, “it’s all organic, it’s real sounds that capture the way the band performs live.”

As one of the most established acts in heavy music Converge’s ability to write and produce songs is now second nature, a fact that’s obvious upon a cursory listen to All We Love We Leave Behind. “I think we really stepped up our game on this record. The most important thing to this band is that with every album we want to create something that excites us and moves us in some way,” explains Bannon, who also crafted a 50-page book of original artwork inspired by the songs that accompanies the release. “There are a lot of subtle nuances on this record are really special to us and we definitely hit those individually on this record.”

From the classic rock-inflected, guitar tapping madness of “Sadness Comes Home” to the technical acrobatics of “Aimless Arrow” and relentless assault of “Shame In The Way,” All We Love We Leave Behind is an extremely varied album that has enough sonic shifts to captivate each listener’s attention. “It’s always been important for us to have a lot of dynamics in our music because no one wants to listen to a million miles an hour all the time,” Bannon responds when asked about the melodic mid-tempo groove of a song like “Coral Blue.” “I really enjoy that song, it has a lot of twists musically that aggressive songs don’t usually have and that’s something we take pride in.”

Lyrically Bannon approached All We Love We Leave Behind by once again writing about his own personal experiences, however there’s no question that this time around his vocals are more direct and decipherable than they’ve been in the past. “This is a personal record and all of the songs tell their own stories,” Bannon explains. “Every song is rooted in real life, documenting what I have experienced over the past few years.” Correspondingly the title of the album is an apology letter to everything he has had to leave behind in order to his path in art and music. Bannon explains that he feels like it’s important to acknowledge these sacrifices in order to be “a self aware individual.”

“All of our albums are emotional but I feel this is our most potent album to date,” Bannon continues. “For me a songs like ‘Predatory Glow’ and ‘Empty on the Inside’ have a tone and resonance that communicates in a new way for our band,” he adds, chalking up this ability to the fact that the group have become better songwriters by spending so much time on the road and in the studio perfecting their craft. “Success to me is creating something that’s moving and fulfilling and I truly feel both of those things when I listen back and experience this album from start to finish.” Converge have always been the type of band that never fit into one subculture and the band credit that to the fact that since their 2001 landmark album Jane Doe they haven’t had any member changes. “I think because it’s been the same four people for the past five records we’ve been able to really get comfortable with each other and develop our own personality,” Ballou explains. “I don’t listen to much music outside of what we’ve recorded so I think we’re more influenced by our own history of playing together than what’s currently happening in any scene.”

In other words when Ballou explains that Converge is the kind of band who have always existed between worlds, it’s not just lip service. “We don’t have one typical type of listener but they tend to be intelligent people who can make up their own minds about things. That works to our advantage because they’re willing to go on this journey with us and follow along with whatever twists and turns we take them on,” he summarizes. Ultimately All We Love We Leave Behind may not be the most straightforward musical journey you’ll embark on but it’s one that you’ll revisit over and over again to relive prior experiences and simultaneously create new ones. It all begins now.

Chelsea Wolfe
Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe’s expansive discography—a theme that ties together her ceaseless explorations in unorthodox textures, haunting melodies, and mining the grandeur embedded within ugliness and pain. With her sixth official album Hiss Spun, Wolfe adopts Miller’s quest to become empowered by embracing the mess of the self, to control the tumult of the soul in hopes of reigning in the chaos of the world around us. “I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free,” Wolfe says of the album before extrapolating on the broader scope of her new collection of songs. “You’re just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting fucked over and killed for shitty reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months, and then you remember it’s been fucked for a long time, it’s been fucked since the beginning. It’s overwhelming and I have to write about it.”

Hiss Spun was recorded by Kurt Ballou in Salem, Massachusetts at the tail end of winter 2017 against a backdrop of deathly quiet snow-blanketed streets and the hissing radiators of warm interiors. While past albums operated on the intimacy of stripped-down folk music (The Grime and the Glow, Unknown Rooms), or the throbbing pulse of supplemental electronics (Pain Is Beauty, Abyss), Wolfe’s latest offering wrings its exquisiteness out of a palette of groaning bass, pounding drums, and crunching distortion. It’s an album that inadvertently drew part of its aura from the cold white of the New England winter, though the flesh-and-bone of the material was culled from upheavals in Wolfe’s personal life, and coming to terms with years of vulnerability, anger, self-destruction, and dark family history. Aside from adding low-end heft with gratuitous slabs of fuzz bass, longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm contributed harrowing swaths of sound collages from sources surrounding the artist and her band in recent years—the rumble of street construction at a tour stop in Prague, the howl of a coyote outside Wolfe’s rural house in California, the scrape of machinery on the floor of a warehouse at a down-and-out friend’s workplace. Music is rendered out of dissonance—bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.

The album opens with the sickening bang of “Spun”, where a lurching bottom-heavy riff provided by Chisholm and Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age, Failure) serves as a foundation to a sultry mantra of fever-dream longing and desire. The first third of Hiss Spun—whether it’s the ominous twang and cataclysmic dynamics of “16 Psyche”, the icy keyboard lines, restless pulse and harrowing bellows of Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, SUMAC) on “Vex”, or the patient repetition and devastating choruses of “The Culling—all carry the weight of desperation, lost love, and withdrawal. Wolfe’s introspection and existential dread turns outwards to the crumbling world around us with “Particle Flux”, an examination of the casualties of war set against an aural sea of static. White noise is a constant thread through Hiss Spun, with Wolfe finding solace in the knowledge that radio static is the sound of the universe expanding outwards from the Big Bang—a reminder that even dissonance has ties to creation. The electronic thump of “Offering” serves as an ode to the Salton Sea and the encroaching calamities stemming from climate change. The obsession with white noise and global destruction carries over into “Static Hum”, where the merciless percussive battery of Wolfe’s former bandmate and current drummer Jess Gowrie helps deliver the dire weight of a sonnet dedicated to a “burning planet.” By the time the album closes with “Scrape”, Wolfe has come full circle and turned her examinations back inward, reflecting over her own mortality with arguably the most commanding vocal performance in her entire oeuvre.

“The album is cyclical, like me and my moods,” Wolfe says of Hiss Spun. “Cycles, obsession, spinning, centrifugal force—all with gut feelings as the center of the self.” And it’s an album that Wolfe sees as a kind of exorcism. “I’m at odds with myself… I got tired of trying to disappear. The record became very personal in that way. I wanted to open up more, but also create my own reality.” Every Chelsea Wolfe album is cathartic, but never before has both the artist and her audience so desperately needed this kind of emotional purging. Sargent House is proud to release Hiss Spun to the world on September 22nd, 2017. – Brian Cook, 2017

This album contains no booklet.