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The biggest hardcore bands of the ’90s were the Victory Records screamers - Earth Crisis, Integrity, Snapcase - who were sonically a whole lot closer to metal than to any known variety of punk. Hardcore and metal had already been feasting on each other’s flesh for years. I’d heard music like this before, but I’d never heard music like this, if that makes any sense at all.Ĭonverge did not invent metalcore. Bannon howls incomprehensible open-wound agonies over what sounds like a mathematically precise weed whacker to the face. The first song on Jane Doe is called “Concubine,” and it’s a frantic, fearsome 79-second hell-spasm that screeches and judders and shudders. The music on that CD promptly peeled my scalp from my skull. But the record store in question, the Sound Garden in Syracuse, had listening stations, so I took threw that CD on immediately. The first time I saw that face, I don’t think I knew Converge as anything other than a name on a flyer. Today, that face appears on running shorts and facemasks and coffee mugs and tote bags, and it still feels haunting and mysterious. That face became a new-equivalent version of the Black Flag bars - a visual signifier for a whole subcultural world. It’s hard to say what was so immediately striking about that album cover, but that image has stayed with us in the two decades since Jane Doe came out. Converge singer Jacob Bannon, who designed the cover, has said that the Jane Doe of Jane Doe isn’t any one particular person, that he assembled the image through layers of acrylics and spray paint and ink and photography. The cover for Converge’s Jane Doe, an album that turns 20 tomorrow, had a stark, heavy, ominous simplicity to it.
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I can still remember the first time I walked into a record store and saw that face.