hardcore

Record #991: Converge – Jane Doe (2001)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

As compulsively as I buy records, if vinyl copies of an album are prohibitively expensive, it’s often easier to pretend it just doesn’t exist. But when you’re dealing with a record as monumental as Converge’s Jane Doe, that ignorance is pretty hard to feign. It is a singular masterpiece in the world of heavy music, offering up a record that is superlative in every aspect—including asking price.

But my wife and I have been working our asses off lately, and we decided we deserved to give ourselves a bonus. The first thing I did was head to Discogs to see what legendary and outrageously priced record I might finally be able to afford. It wasn’t a hard decision to make. And even as much as I paid for it (not quite a hundred, but close enough to sting), it’s worth every penny.

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Record #984: As We Draw – Lines Breaking Circles (2010)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I usually try to be pretty discerning with my record purchases. My wantlist always exceeds my budget, so I try to make sure that I’m completely sold on what I’m buying.

But every once in a while, I’ll come upon something like a $10 vinyl sale and just become a madman. I’ll spend an hour or more frantically scrolling, streaming the first few minutes of a record for a sample before making a gut decision.

And thus is how I ended up with Lines Breaking Circles, the debut record from As We Draw, a killer blend of screamo, black metal, hardcore, and sludge.

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Record #952: Fiddlehead – Death is Nothing to Us (2023)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

By now, it’s become pretty apparent that Fiddlehead has overcome every curse that befalls supergroups. While many similar groups are crushed by the weight of their own hype before their first record, Fiddlehead continues to get better.

Death Is Nothing To Us continues the band’s penchant for observing grief through a lens of fist-pumping, emotional post-hardcore, but this time around, they magnify the nuance of both their sound and mourning to subatomic detail.

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Record #923: Blanket – Modern Escapism (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Kids today don’t appreciate how good they’ve got it. Back in my day (groans), it would take hours to download a single song, so you would have to carefully weigh what you were interested in hearing so you could make the most of your download time. If you just discovered a new emo band, you would typically spend your precious time downloading other emo bands, only rarely straying beyond that.

Now, thanks to streaming platforms and high speed internet speeds, you can jump from Sunny Day Real Estate to My Bloody Valentine to Slayer to Body Count to 100 Gecs instantly. The floodgates are open.

One of the most interesting byproducts of this unfettered access to the whole of recorded music is the widespread cross-pollination of scenes and genres. I’ve been around long enough to see how shoegaze, metal, and hardcore have interbred to create heavier shoegaze (or gazier metal?).

I listen to a lot of that sort of stuff, so it takes a bit for me to be impressed anymore. And “impressed” is a weak word for my reaction to Blanket, whose second LP Modern Escapism recently grabbed me by the lapels and demanded my attention.

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Record #918: Crowning – Survival / Sickness (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I have said, often and loudly, that I don’t like screamo. And I don’t mean screamo as a catchall term for any music with screaming in it, like your mom uses it, but as a distinct branch of emo and hardcore heralded by bands like Orchid, pg.99, and Saetia. I’ve proclaimed for years that it’s too abrasive and tuneless for my tastes.

Exceptions were made, of course, for envy. And Boneflower. And Chalk Hands. And Birds in Row. And…actually you know what, maybe I do like screamo. Because recently, I’ve found a few skramz records that I really love. One that was introduced to me recently was Survival / Sickness, the debut record from Crowning out of Chicago, a cathartic fury so explosive that it lasts a mere eighteen minutes before burning out. Still, it packs in more energy in that short runtime than several albums three times its length.

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Record #899: Converge – You Fail Me Redux (2004/2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’ve been carrying a shameful secret: I’ve never gotten into Converge.

Barring Bloodmoon, if you count that as a Converge album (I don’t), I’ve spent precious little time with the legendary metalcore band’s catalog. However, this is entirely due to the economics of Converge vinyl, most of which sell for well over $50. It’s been far more affordable for me to just ignore them.

But recently while browsing, I spied a cheap copy of You Fail Me Redux, a remixed version of their 2004 record. I dropped the cash on reputation alone, and it’s been worth every penny.

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Record #868: Bloodmoon – Bloodmoon: I (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Usually, when artists announce a collaboration, you can make a pretty educated guess as to what the end result might sound like. Take for instance Volcano Choir, the union of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and mathy post rockers Collections of Colonies of Bees, who released music that sounds like Bon Iver playing mathy post rock. Or May Our Chambers Are Full by Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle, which found ERR offering her gothic country vocals over Thou’s relentless sludge.

But then you have projects like Bloodmoon, which unites all of Converge with Chelsea Wolfe, her ubiquitous collaborator Ben Chisholm, and Cave In’s Stephen Brodsky. There isn’t much common ground between the chaotic mathcore, gothic doom, and melodic space metal of the three respective projects to predict what it might sound like.

There’s no low-hanging fruit so ripe that it’s practically picking itself off of the vine. Instead, this album is carefully and laboriously worked. It sounds cultivated, not gathered. And, every drop of sweat was worth it.

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Record #861: Heriot – Profound Morality (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In feudal England, a heriot was a tribute paid to the lord of the land when a serf passed away. It was an undeniably oppressive practice, robbing poor families now bereft for the benefit of the already wealthy tyrant of the land. The heavy outfit Heriot from the UK practices a similar form of oppression, but in the form of their sonics.

One of my go-to phrases in describing music is “oppressively heavy.” But when I first heard Heriot, I realized that I have not known what it means to be so heavy that it’s oppressive. This is the kind of sonic density that squeezes your skull, that crushes your bones. It’s the sort of heaviness that dominates your attention and ceases the existence of all else.

Profound Morality, their debut, is only eighteen minutes long, but it leaves an impact crater far larger than its physical size, thanks to its unrelenting mixture of metalcore, industrial, post metal, old school hardcore, and even some glimmers of nu-metal.

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Record #830: Hot Water Music – Caution (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

By now, anyone who knows me should already know that there are some inexplicable and inexcusable gaps in my music knowledge. There are plenty of bands that I should have grown up loving but ignored for one reason or another.

In the case of Hot Water Music, my suspicion is that I had confused them for Poison the Well, who I never cared for. And yes, I know how stupid that was.

I’ve set to mending these gaps over the last few years, but few of those undertakings have been as satisfying as Hot Water Music’s Caution, a fiery burst of melodic post hardcore that checks just about every box of what I was looking for as a high schooler.

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Record #816: Bad Brains – Bad Brains (1982)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The conversations around the greatest punk band of all time are often focused in the rivalry between USA and the UK. Punks wax philosophical about The Ramones or The Clash, Black Flag or the Buzzcocks…(note: I’m intentionally omitting the band Virgin Records put together to reappropriate punk aesthetics).

One factor that’s not often brought up is that of race. True, there might not be too much to talk about there—for all its rebellion against the status quo, punk has always skewed heavily white. But for Bad Brains, whose legend demands that they’re mentioned in any conversation about important punk bands, their punk cred is tied intrinsically to their blackness, both in lyrical content and the way they were perceived in their early days.

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