Converge & Chelsea Wolfe: Bloodmoon I

- There’s a red moon rising. In fact it’s been shedding a baleful glare across us for a while, since as far back as 2016, when Converge & Chelsea Wolfe, performing under the moniker Bloodmoon, first had a go at performing some revamped Converge material for the Roadburn festival over in the Netherlands. It was a meeting very well received by the assembled hordes of heavy music aficionados and so, everyone involved decided to take it further. As you can imagine, it was a pretty terrible time to enter into a collaborative partnership, but it’s difficult to imagine these two prolific and innovative heavy music powerhouses being challenged by something like a pandemic. Is the opus they’ve stitched together a dark gift courtesy of Kurt Ballou’s unholy studio powers, or is it just that the passage of the moon is inexorable, rising ever higher, till all about are soaked in its bloody glow?

In what little they’ve said about the record in the lead-up to its release, all of the contributors have spoken to the feeling that they’re out of their comfort zone here. Wolfe is quoted: “The project stretched my vocals in new ways. It’s so different than what I normally sing over that I was able to open up and be vulnerable with my vocals.” Given her ability to reinvent herself, having a go, over the years, at a spectrum of dark and forbidding styles, starting from neofolk and heading without compromise all the way through to extreme metal, I had wondered if she was just being polite. No, it’s actually true. Finding cover amongst the close vocal harmonies and screaming, has given her the confidence to stretch her typically ethereal soprano, gaining volume and colour I don’t think I’ve previously heard. The boldest and most obvious changes have to be to Converge’s playbook, however, following Wolfe’s lead as they add to their typically experimental hardcore with the post-rock tinged doom of eponymous first single, Blood Moon.  To give everyone an idea of the sharp turns they could expect, that was quickly contrasted with another, very different single, all oldschool heavy metal and goth-rock, called Coil. The rest of the record boasts all sorts of diverse treats, including the countrified deathrock of Scorpion’s Sting and blissfully, some hardcore that sounds a lot like Converge in cuts like Tounges Playing Dead.

This is really a supergroup, also taking in Cave In founder (and former member of Converge) Stephen Brodsky, as well as Wolfe’s regular collaborator Ben Chisolm. It is, obviously, to the credit of everyone involved that they’ve so adroitly avoided the stereotypical morass of clashing ideas and egos that wreck outings like this. Instead, Bloodmoon: I is the sound of its contributors not only playing to their strengths but building on those together into something fruitfully, surprisingly different.

I’m not quite sure what the significance of Blood Moon’s pagan observances are. From the alarming powers of the Blood Moon itself to the decaying promise of the Flower Moon there doesn’t appear to be much wiccan renewal or heralding of seasonal abundance. Instead the great orb looks down, piercing all with its sight, or as Wolfe puts it: “Blood moon ascends in the night /  Cosmic unblinking eye / Gazing through flesh and bone / Into the glow of our souls.” It sits in judgement, like a pagan panopticon, promising a grim tide replete with a bestiary populated by scorpions, daimons and, at its apex, The Lord Of Lies.

Appropriately the record is released in conjunction with an actual lunar eclipse, although I’m not sure the cosmos can muster anything quite as unsettling as the music - the eclipse is only partial after all; more of a ghostly pink than crimson. Still, what does the sky know? Since we are -if the scientists and prognosticators are to be believed- most likely, doomed. Whatever our fate, Converge & Chelsea Wolfe are more than fit heralds for it, Blood Moon: I is a visceral and compelling portent. I await Blood Moon: II with enthusiasm, should we survive to see its advent.

- Chris Cobcroft.