Converge and friends find an alternative to ripping your face off on Bloodmoon

Hardcore is a marathon and a sprint for Converge. Boston’s most ferocious band has been working itself into a frothing frenzy since the early ’90s, pacing itself only in the relative infrequency of releases. Every few years, these veterans of virtuosic intensity return to run circles around countless fellow colliders of punk and metal. Don’t they ever get winded? Just restless, maybe: You could hear the faintest hint of boredom on The Dusk In Us, the last Converge album—and the first since their baby-faced infancy to sound a little like a victory lap, a touch formulaic in its racket.

No such accusations could be lobbed at the band’s curveball of a follow-up, Bloodmoon: I. If anything, this eclectic and often haunting album is a blatant broadside against creative stagnation, betraying a clear desire to stretch beyond the set boundaries of a time-honored, time-honed extremity. Which is to say, a group that has long found new, thrilling ways to go hard and fast is softening and slowing its assault, locating (thanks to some choice guest contributors) new dimensions of the Converge sound: songs that slither rather than gallop and whisper instead of roar.

It’s not totally unprecedented, this muffling of the maelstrom. The Converge discography is dotted with departures; there’s a croaking murder ballad or palate-cleansing atmospheric detour on just about every album since the group began leaning more heavily into the metal side of its equation with its turning-point classic of the genre, 2001’s unbeatable Jane Doe.

In fact, many of those relatively quieter numbers made it into Bloodmoon’s live namesake progenitor, a series of festival appearances that found Converge transforming and rearranging moodier deep cuts with the help of doom-goth singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe, her regular collaborator, Ben Chisholm, and former Converge bassist and current Cave In frontman Steve Brodsky. All three have returned to conjure some of that diversifying mojo with a collection of studio originals.

On record, as onstage, Bloodmoon shines a pale beam of illumination on Converge’s less berserk side. Not a single cut here would keep the pit churning from start to finish. Second song “Viscera Of Men” commences like one of the band’s usual track-two shifts into deranged high gear… for all of 15 seconds, after which the brakes are slammed, sending the tune into an ominous black-metal seance. The opening title track drags plinking piano to the forefront, while a pair of late numbers revive the lonely old West simmer of “Cruel Bloom,” a Tom Waits-esque ditty from what previously amounted to the band’s most collaborative record, Axe To Fall.

It’s Wolfe and Brodsky that really distinguish this new crop, adding several bona fide duets to the Converge songbook and largely reducing the larynx-shredding bark of lead screamer Jacob Bannon to an occasional flourish. Bloodmoon thrives whenever Wolfe is cooing and crooning into the mic—she brings an emotional texture that’s simply outside Bannon’s range. Brodsky, on the other hand, has the tendency to tilt his former full-time bandmates toward the sound of his current ones: Were it not for some periodic guttural accompaniment and guitarist Kurt Ballou’s calm-before-the-storm intro, it’d be easy to mistake “Failure Forever” for a Cave In outtake.

More often, Bloodmoon suggests what Converge might sound like with three lead singers: a hydra of sometimes contrasting, sometimes complementary vocal styles. Their talents combine to chills-inducing effect on “Coil,” a ghostly hymnal that expands and contracts like the serpent of its lyrics, plucked strings setting the shuddery tone before the powerhouse group crescendo of the chorus. It’s the high point of the album—though not quite its furthest veer from the Converge playbook.

That accolade would probably go to the Wolfe-led “Crimson Stone,” perhaps the only song this band has ever recorded that could be described, without irony or deception, as purely beautiful. You keep waiting for the, well, axe to fall. And even when it eventually does, there’s a sustained majesty that rivals the prettiest epics by longtime tourmates Neurosis.

The (again, relative) mellowness may turn off some diehards. Even those willing to go along for the ride into calmer, uncharted waters could find themselves eventually itching for a screech back into the characteristic ferocity that never arrives. The blitzkrieg is easy to miss—it’s what wormed this band into pounding, damaged hearts everywhere. But Bloodmoon handily proves, if past deviations hadn’t already, that Converge is still Converge when not playing at full speed or volume. And in its expanded melodic vocabulary, the record makes a fresh case for the band’s continued dominance of the extreme-music landscape. Tortoise or hare, these guys always win the race.