Rough Music on Jane Doe (Guest Post)

We've already heard from Pulco and Paddy Johnston this week; today, it's the turn of Rough Music guitarist Joe O'Connell to tell us about the album that inspired his band's contribution to Songs About Albums: Volume 1. Our third and final guest blog of the week is all about Jane Doe by Converge - take it away, Joe!

I can't pinpoint exactly when I first heard Converge in terms of dates, but I know exactly where I was: lying on my parents' sofa late at night in a brain-dead state, watching video after video of (probably) shit metal on MTV2. Just when I was considering that it might be time to go to bed, from nowhere came Converge's Concubine/Fault and Fracture. It was one of those perfect musical discoveries. You know when you're waiting to hear 'the new thing' without knowing exactly what you want it to be? Well it turns out that, at that time, I was in the market for some totally brutal thrashcore.

I was blown away. Not just by the song: the video is fucking terrifying. Unfortunately, thanks to MTV gremlins, the song info didn't appear at the end. The following day I posted a description on the Punktastic forum to see if anybody could enlighten me as to who it was by. However, as was often the case with my occasional internet utterances, nobody responded. It was some years - a good time after I had gotten into Converge properly - before I discovered who that video was by.

I should note that metal hadn't always been my thing. As a lot of people born in mid-1980s Britain will probably relate, I first properly got into pop music at the peak of the Britpop era, thanks in part to Blur's Country House. From there, my early CD collection became an accumulation of white and usually British men with guitars: Manics, Radiohead, Mansun, etc. My early teens were characterised by a desire to appear on Later... with Jools Holland wearing combat trousers and horn-rimmed, orange-tinted sunglasses, fronting a quasi-prog indie band.