"Towing Jehovah", Converge's Exquisite Corpse
"Towing Jehovah", Converge's Exquisite Corpse
Drumming Upstream 32
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 side. 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 form2. 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? The second question is easier to answer. A less than great Converge song is still better than most metalcore, metal, or hardcore, and in a Roadburn-anticipating state of mind I was charitable to the raw thrills of even the inessential sections of their catalog. The first question on the other hand gives us a great opportunity to define a great Converge song by contrast. Put simply, “Towing Jehovah” is not a great Converge song because it does not do what it says on the tin. I don’t mean that it does not literally transport the body of god from the back of a moving vehicle, nor do I mean that it doesn’t accurately adapt the novel Towing Jehovah by James K. Morrow, though it does neither of those things. What I mean is that “Towing Jehovah” does not treat its author’s band name as a verb. It does not converge.
Yes, perhaps unsurprisingly for a band named when its members were in high school, Converge has a literal meaning. The band’s music occupies the intersection of multiple genres of heavy music. They are a hardcore punk band but make liberal use of metal idioms, hence their classification as “metallic hardcore” or “metalcore”3. They don’t stop just at combining these big categories either. Converge mix multiple strains of each style, pulling from the open-hearted pathos of emo and the closed-fisted aggression of the Boston hardcore scene. When they go metal they can either play with the blistering speed of Slayer4 of the suffocating density of Neurosis. Not to mention all of the tricks they copy from noise rock or post punk. Naming every element of Converge’s sound takes longer than listening to most Converge songs. At their best all of these elements, uh, coalesce into a single hostile substance. Listeners are too busy getting the insides of their ear canals power cleaned to bother with classification.
I feel like I may have understated this so far, maybe because I’m accustomed to it, but Converge’s music is really intense, even in the high decibel world they occupy. I’ve seen hardened metal fans and unsuspecting normies alike balk within seconds of hearing a Converge tune. A large part of the shock comes from Bannon’s voice, a raspy, inarticulate shriek that barely qualifies as human. The rest comes from just how hard Converge play. Everything moves at a breakneck pace, sometimes to the point where the band don’t even sound like they’re in control of what’s coming out of their hands.
“Towing Jehovah” gets pretty far on raw force, especially if you’re hearing it for the first time. With repeated spins the effect wears off. It won’t take long to notice that none of the song’s parts go together. One of Ballou’s post-Poacher Diaries breakthroughs was the realization that if he ordered his songs into recognizable forms with verses and choruses even his most challenging and off-putting material could feel catchy. “Towing Jehovah” on the other hand is a string of unrelated ideas that happen once and never return. Some of those ideas are terrific. The rumbling shuffle that opens the song is badass and the lurching midtempo break halfway through is the kind of off-kilter decision that only Converge could have made. Each leap from one riff to the next is defensible on its own, either for being an intuitive next step or a meaningful contrast with what came before it, but taken as a whole the song feels like a story an elementary schooler would tell you: “…and then this happened then that happened and then this happened…” and so on.
When writing about linear heavy music in this series I’ve previously used the song’s lyrics to make sense of their structure. No such luck here. As is the case with many Converge songs, it isn’t even clear if the lyrics match Bannon’s recorded performance or if they were just a prompt. If you try and read along you’ll notice that he skips ahead and doubles back with no care for stanza breaks. Given how hard it is to make out what Bannon’s saying this conflict between the written page and the performance doesn’t have too big of an impact on the final product, but it does make it hard to reverse engineer any lyrical motivation for “Towing Jehovah”’s shaggy dog structure. Taken purely as poetic accompaniment to the music, the lyric sheet still doesn’t give us much to work with. Bannon’s lyrics are a lot like his enunciation, rich with feeling but spare on the details. He paints himself interchangeably as an angel with worn down wings, a laborer, and a martyr. Clearly he’s emotionally exhausted, but by what and by whom is never clear. Bannon is straight up Lynchian when it comes to his reticence toward explaining his lyrics, but great Converge songs tend to climax with a line so direct in its emotional intensity that no explanation is necessary. “Towing Jehovah” contains no line that fits the bill. All we have is the silence of God and the screech of Bannon.
No, if we’re going to understand what makes “Towing Jehovah” tick, we’ll need to understand it physically. A hardcore song lives and dies by what it does to living and breathing bodies. The mosh pit does not lie. “Towing Jehovah” hasn’t graced a Converge set in years. So in lieu of experiencing the song in the flesh we’ll have to try the next best way to embody it: the practice space.
Side B
“Towing Jehovah”
Performed by Damon Bellorado
111-135 BPM
Time Signatures: 4/4, 5/4, 6/4, 3/4
Damon Bellorado bears the unfortunate fate of being the drummer for Converge before Ben Koller. He is not alone in the shape of this misfortune. Pete Best of The Beatles5, Clive Burr of Iron Maiden (DU#21), and Scott Raynor of Blink-182 could commiserate. But geez, even in that crowd Bellorado had some tough luck. It’s not that his work with Converge was bad, especially considering how young he was at the time. It’s just that Ben Koller is freakishly good at drumming. I dread learning the Koller-verge tunes about as much as anything on my Liked list. “Towing Jehovah” was tough enough, for reasons that I’ll get to soon, but it’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the challenges in the Converge canon.
Outside of Converge Bellorado hasn’t left much of a musical imprint. The only other release of note that I could find in his credits was Free to Think, Free to Be, an EP by Bane, fellow former Converger Aaron Dalbec’s side project turned main project. That EP is more anti-smoking public service announcement than music. Bane are a hugely popular band whose minimalist logo t-shirt (modeled by Dalbec above) gave the Jane Doe tee a serious run for its money as the most popular merch item in the 00s northeast hardcore scene. But Free to Think, Free to Be is much less essential to Bane’s catalog than When Forever Comes Crashing is to Converge’s. Bellorado simply isn’t a major player the way his replacement was.
I was once described as having “Faramir Energy”, so I’ve always had a soft spot for these second drummers of history. While I’ve been taking a critical approach to “Towing Jehovah” (mostly because, to be clear, I’m going to be so effusive about the the next few Converge songs in this series), I will lay none of the blame at Bellorado’s feet. I was in a hardcore band in my early 20s too6, and my feet couldn’t do what his did on this track back then. Moreover, the technical nitpicks I could offer about the performance feel baked into the chaotic structure of the song. As you can see in the Side B header, “Towing Jehovah” jumps around a bunch of different tempos. Some of these leaps are by design, others are the natural fluctuations of playing high octane music without a metronome. How can I judge that when I had to reorganize my practice routine around learning how to keep up with him?
I started by breaking “Towing Jehovah” into discrete sections, a task the band’s hectic songwriting made easier than usual. Here’s what I came up with:
Riff 1: A 4/4 shuffle at roughly 120 BPM
Ritardando: The band repeat a chunk of Riff 1 and gradually slow down to set up…
Drone: The band bang out half notes at roughly 112 BPM while Bannon screams his head off
Riff 2: A cycle of 5/47, 5/4, 6/4 at 130 BPM. Kick drum plays straight 16th notes underneath.
Riff 3: The tempo jumps to 135 BPM and the meter straightens out to 4/4 while the kick drum keeps pumping out 16th notes
Riff 4: An abrupt shift into double time at 111 BPM. The meter is unclear but my best guess is 4/4, 3/4, 4/4
Breakdown: An equally abrupt shift to 118 BPM for a halftime mosh riff and a short quote of Riff 2 to close it out.
I knew that I wouldn’t have any trouble with the opening passages of the song. All I had to do was hit hard, frown, and imagine I was riding a motorcycle. It took a bit longer to match the exact tempo of the transitional parts, but those were otherwise straightforward as well. Jumping ahead, I had no trouble with the breakdown either since its dotted quarter note pattern is a meat substitute & potatoes staple of any vegan hardcore diet. Everything else in between was going to be tough.
Despite being a metal fan for decades, I have never been particularly good at playing double kick pedals. Not for lack of trying, I spent hours in high school and college drilling the basic exercises, but since most of my experience playing live has been in less aggressive rock music and musical theater I never had any opportunities to road test my progress. Over the years since graduation I neglected the double kick in favor of more marketable skills. Gradually the second pedal sunk into the depths of my parents’ basement. This year, knowing that I couldn’t avoid the double kick if I ever wanted to complete Drumming Upstream, I vowed to finally get good.
To work my way up to the 135 BPM peak of Bellorado’s double bass playing on “Towing Jehovah” I worked on three interrelated things: speed, endurance, and coordination. At the start of the year I could comfortably play 16th notes at 100 BPM, which meant I needed to gradually ramp up my speed to the 130-135 range. Bellorado keeps his feet pumping for roughly 40 second straight, so I also needed to make sure I could play at the right tempo for more than a few measures at a time. Finally, I needed to make sure that my lower body was synchronized with my upper body, especially with all of the shifting time signatures in Riff 2.
The key to achieving all three of those skills was improving my left foot. My right foot could already handle what was being asked of it, but my left had years of kick drum experience to catch up on. To bring it up to speed I cycled through a few different exercises. I played a lot of double bass at slower tempos (thankfully I’ve been writing a lot more music that involves mid-tempo double kick playing lately). I did drills that gradually tested the upper limits of my speed. On the suggestion of Thomas Lang, I played drills that forced my left foot to play more notes than my right. And while I can’t quantify exactly how much this helped, I continued to exercise away from the kit. Speaking personally, improving my core strength and keeping my legs in running shape has helped a lot when it came to keeping my form consistent while practicing these double bass exercises. Working out didn’t make me better at drumming, but it did make me better at getting better at drums.
While my feet caught up, I did my best to figure out what the heck was going on in Riff 4. I’m pretty sure that if you asked the five members of Converge how to count this riff you’d get four different answers and one withering glare. It sounds to me like they’re cutting the measure just slightly short for a four beat fill, but exactly how short is hard to tell. I tried a few different ways of counting and this felt the closest to lining up with the rest of the band, but I’ll let you be the judge.
For this performance I wore my Deathwish Inc. tank top, which made me feel like that picture of Rob Lowe wearing a generic NFL hat at a game.
Having safely transported myself to the other side of “Towing Jehovah” I can say with certainty that it is two great riffs with little to do with each other in search of a song. Everything not quite right about the song, the way it loses momentum in the first half and then races to the finish in the second, comes from the the incompatibility of the opening riff and what I’ve been calling Riff 2. I’m not saying that you couldn’t write a great song with these two riffs but the task is a difficult one given their differences in tempo and meter. “Towing Jehovah” is not that song.
Great song it may not be, but I’m grateful to “Towing Jehovah” for giving me my first tangible marker of progress on my double kick journey. The floodgates are now open, there will be plenty more songs with double kick coming soon. Oh! Another neat thing about Riff 2 is that even though it’s made up of two different signatures, if you add up 5, 5, and 6 you get 16 which is the same as 4x4. That means you could count the whole sequence in 4/4 and you’d line up at the start of the riff again right on time. That concept will also come in handy soon, but before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s see where “Towing Jehovah” lands on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
One of the many Converge shirts I own has a torso sized still image of Javier Bardem in the role of Anton Chigurh in the movie No Country For Old Men. Perhaps it’s fitting then that when I try to summarize my feelings on “Towing Jehovah” the only thing that comes to mind is Irish actor Kelly Macdonald as Carla Jean Moss delivering in a perfect Texas drawl the line “that don’t make no sense”.
Still, even if “Towing Jehovah” is measurably not a great Converge song, it contains unmistakable traces of potential greatness. Returning to the song in a post-Jane Doe world, you can hear just how close they were to figuring it out. It is a rare sensation to anticipate something that’s already happened. That is at least good enough for the 22nd spot on the Leaderboard, above Tim Hecker’s “Virginal II” (DU#12) and below Chvrches’ “Playing Dead” (DU#30). The next time Converge appear in Drumming Upstream they will score much, much higher.
The Current Top 10
Thank you for reading. As I warned at the end of last year, this is just the beginning of a long stretch of heavy music that’s about to appear in Drumming Upstream, but for the next entry I’ll have a song ready that offers a different kind of physicality. Until then, have a nice week.
The Armed, one of the many, many bands that Koller drums for outside of Converge, will appear in Drumming Upstream.
I’ve used this quote once before in an essay about The Dillinger Escape Plan when they announced their retirement. The Dillinger Escape Plan will appear multiple times in Drumming Upstream.
Ok, yes I know that these two genre names are not interchangeable and in fact refer to types of bands that wouldn’t be caught dead in the same green room together, but I’ve got plenty of readers who aren’t steeped in the minutia of loud guitar music taxonomy and I’d like to at least gesture toward the concept of readability.
Slayer will appear in Drumming Upstream.
The Beatles will appear in Drumming Upstream. Pete Best will not.
Fair’s fair, here was my best effort at scaling Mount Dillinger back in 2012. I, uh, would not write those lyrics that way today, but I’m glad I was getting that out of my system. If you’d like to know what kind of lyrics I would write these days, keep an eye on the Lamniformes Bandcamp page.