Blood. Always blood. Splashed across the sleeve of the record, over the insert, even over the slab of clear vinyl itself. Blood, dripping and giving you some clue as to what you should be expecting.
Converge start with the song ‘Thaw’ which provides a good example of where these crazies are heading nowadays, a cavalcade of splurged dissonance and harrowed screams, technical wizardry to make guitar geeks across the land squeal, weep and faint, and enough haphazard time changes to ensure you never quite know whether you’re coming or going. Pretty fucking good by most standards, but rather a shame that this track also showed up on ‘Jane Doe’.
Next up is a Depeche Mode cover, electronic and eerie as you like, with the vocals a seedy croon over brooding drums and heavily processed guitars that swim in and out of focus. Not heavy in the metal sense, but managing intensity by way of mood and ambience. Next up are three live songs from various points in the band’s career. These are well-recorded and all, but, as with most live material, ultimately throwaway.
Hellchild, meanwhile, play harsh, pained, mid-paced metalcore, sometimes shifting up or down a notch with slurred vocals that sound like a dog choking on a guinea pig. The band occasionally border on the interesting but for the most part their side of the LP is a bit of a thumb-twiddler, comprising one new song, one fairly crap Bulldozer cover and two live tracks that incorporate both dubious guitar frippery and some even more dubious ‘singing’.
So, eh: not terrible, but certainly not essential by any stretch of the imagination.