The Jonbenet
ugly/heartless
Pluto Records
By Jose Fritz
This band is ferocious and menacing. Give it a listen. Give it two listens, one for each speaker. Press your face into the grill cloth over the cones. Feel up close what they're trying to do to you. It’s been done before, but not nearly so well. The pace is fast, but not frantic, falling somewhere between The Blood Brothers and Forgive Her, Choke Her. I refuse to compare them to their hardcore brethren because it belays the greater appeal of their music. Imagine Plastic Constellations playing at double speed and you’ll be in the ballpark.
I was in their hometown of Houston twice in the last year and it’s gone from bad to worse. The influx of 20,000 homeless and impoverished Cajuns [thanks, George W. Bush] didn’t do that city any good, but nonetheless, under the overpass the typical crowd of twenty illegals looking for a little trabajo has been joined by a hundred transients with French accents. That’s the ugly, heartless city that The Jonbenet lives in, and it’s the one that birthed this album.
The difference between The Jonbenet and Converge is that the latter is much less tuneful. As important as intensity is to them, they will slow down a notch if they need to show off a nice discordant melody. It’s a deliberate and delicate decision and not one you’d expect from a band of Sabbath-loving rednecks that named themselves after a murdered child pageant queen.
Their EP, The Plot Thickens, which came out two years ago, was an outright Blood Brothers rip-off. It was brutal, spastic and technically impressive, but it had been done before. Ugly and Heartless rips down a metalcore tangent like Botch, but with a southern rock flair that sidesteps that pigeonhole, entirely making for a brutal and eminently listenable record.
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