Review Summary: A hurricane of everything that makes you feel alive, especially pain.
Jane Doe is the ugliest face you’ve ever seen. Jane Doe is the most interesting face you’ve ever touched. Jane Doe is the Wall breaking down in loop for eternity. Jane Doe is every ant in the world being crushed simultaneously. Jane Doe is all of humanity’s hopes and resources entrusted in a rocket ship designed to break into hell rather than heaven.
Jane Doe is the first time you touched someone you liked. Jane Doe is the last time someone you liked touched you. Jane Doe is god coming down to tell you that, in fact, there hasn’t been a single injustice through history, because the world IS justice. Jane Doe is a life-changing poem written with the pieces of a human skull. Jane Doe is a bunch of angry kids with rock instruments, and it is what happens when those kids are possessed by the need to implode those instruments into the colors of a masterpiece. Jane Doe is a rainbow painted with the blood of every living organism (and a little colouring sugar too).
Jane Doe is 25th Century Schizoid Angel, which here means it feels like King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man must have felt to the hippies who first heard it in 1969 before prog or metal or pretty much even jazz fusion even existed, except that in this record that feeling will remain at least until every person alive right now is underground. It is also 10,000,000 bc Schizoid Life Itself In Its Struggle To Survive and To Feel. It is everything that makes you want to cry in triumph and ecstacy and cry in pain and anger rolled into a hurricane of needles and holy water mixed with LSD and wine from Dionysus’s secret garden.
Jane Doe is an experience you have to bear through yourself. At first it might scare you like the hydra guarding the sacred spring and treasures, but bear with it like Atlas does the world and fight through it like the brave Hercules did and not only will you find the treasure these cacophonous guitar were keeping: you will
know that you are the
hero that slayed the monster. And if you don’t, no one else ever did no matter what they tell you; no review can tell you why dissonance is good until dissonance resonates within you (evidence: kids in youtube who say they showed Converge to their guitar teacher so he could prove that they’re “bad” because they don’t follow the rules of “good” music--sorry, kid, that’s why your teacher’s watching your fingers fail minor scales over and over instead of making thousands of bright individuals have the most punishing and wonderful night of their lives, like Converge have done for decades: he never understood that those aren’t “rules”, those are
conventions). Hence, these metaphors will have to do until you hear it, and maybe even after; just make sure that, when you’re hearing it, you’re not reading anything other than
yourself (as I am right now).
