Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 447 songs to go!
This week I learned how to play “Towing Jehovah” by Converge, a long-running and critically acclaimed hardcore punk band from Salem, Massachusetts. Converge will appear in several future entries of Drumming Upstream but “Towing Jehovah” will be the only appearance from their first drummer Damon Bellorado. This song also features a major technical milestone for Drumming Upstream. To find out what I mean, scroll on, and bring earplugs.
Side A
“Towing Jehovah”
By Converge
When Forever Comes Crashing
Released on April 14th, 1998
Liked on February 2nd, 2016
There has never been a moment since the moment I first heard them where Converge were not impressed upon me as legendary. The shape of that legend has changed in the twenty years I’ve known them, but the laws of thermodynamics have held strong. No matter the form, burning molten in the underground, palpably rigid as stone, or as ephemeral as smoke, Converge have made up roughly the same heft of psychic mass in heavy music’s collective unconscious since the late 1990s. Despite falling short on every conventional metric of industry success except longevity, Converge are one of the most critically acclaimed and culturally significant bands in the history of heavy music.
Converge, currently and canonically comprised of singer/graphic designer Jacob Bannon, guitarist/producer Kurt Ballou, bassist/singer Nate Newton, and drummer/human muppet Ben Koller, emerged from Salem, MA in the mid-1990s while Bannon was still in high school. After building a reputation across the underground hardcore scene for their unruly and violent live shows, Converge crashed into broader awareness with their 2001 album Jane Doe. As Jane Doe’s cover art propagated across t-shirts, hoodies, tank tops (I’m wearing one right now, actually), tote-bags, enamel pins, wall flags and tattoo parlors the world over, Converge themselves became a fixture on metal and hardcore festivals, magazine covers, and until very recently, the upper rungs of Best Album of the Year lists anytime they released new music.
Parallel to their success as a unit, the band’s members had a direct hand in shaping the look and sound of the rest of the genre. Ballou, who has handled Converge’s production since 2006, is one of the most in-demand producers in heavy music. Bannon’s mixed media art has graced the cover of countless records, including many released by his label Deathwish Inc.. Newton and Koller stay busy in a number of side projects1 and supergroups. If you include the ever-expanding number of bands directly influenced by them, it is practically impossible to care about underground music without reckoning with Converge. They are that kind of band.
The Converge that made “Towing Jehova” however, are not that band. They aren’t made up the same people, first of all. Bannon & Ballou aside the lineup is completely different, sporting Aaron Dalbec (Bane) on second guitar, Stephen Brodsky (Cave In, Mutoid Man) on bass, and Damon Bellorado on drums (more on him on Side B). This version of the band was still years off from the critical darling status they’ve enjoyed since. And, crucially, they were nowhere close to being as polished as songwriters as they’d be in the coming decade.
Converge are happy to admit that they weren’t quite there yet. In an interview with Vice in 2017, Jacob Bannon described When Forever Comes Crashing, of which “Towing Jehovah” is the 6th track, as “the first proper Converge album”. It isn’t hard to tell what he means by this. The previous Converge albums were cobbled together collections of demos, live recordings, and hastily recorded studio tracks. When Forever Comes Crashing is the first album of theirs that feels like it was meant to be listened to instead of carried home as a bloody souvenir from a basement show. Even before it got the remaster treatment in 2005 after Converge broke through for real, When Forever Comes Crashing is unmistakably an album assembled with an ear for pacing, stylistic cohesion, and uniform-ish songwriting quality. But just because Converge were doing the work necessary to make a good album, they weren’t necessarily doing that work well.
Two months after I Liked “Towing Jehovah” I attended Roadburn Festival in Tilburg in the Netherlands. Converge were booked to perform two sets that year, first playing Jane Doe all the way through for the first time ever followed the next day by a set of deep cuts and covers with special guests that highlighted their softer side2. In the morning between the two performances I watched a public interview with Ballou and Newton. When asked about how his songwriting style changed over the years, Ballou joked that after he realized he couldn’t top The Dillinger Escape Plan’s technical prowess he started to focus on structure and form3. Ballou dated that switch to the period after 1999’s The Poacher Diaries, which places “Towing Jehovah” firmly in the pre-mature period.
This leaves us with two contrasting questions: What makes “Towing Jehovah” a less than great Converge song, and why, if it is less than great, did I Like it in 2016?
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