Slaughter to Prevail - Misery Sermon

These guys have debuted with some of the most enthusiastic support I’ve seen for a newly emerging deathcore band in recent memory. Like Oceano, they face the same tremendous obstacle of standing out from the deathcore crowd while fitting in with the deathcore crowd. A little bit less focused on sheer brutality, Slaughter to Prevail do make good use of some songwriting tricks that allow tracks like “Chronic Slaughter”, “Russian Hate”, and “King” to stand out from the crop of deathcore corn. Misery Sermon is indeed an album indulgent in all of deathcore’s norms and only reaches as far as those boundaries allow them to, but where they do reach, and with the tools they do use to reach as far as they do, they make themselves known effectively. And for a 2017 deathcore release, this debut is pleasantly diverse, not necessarily in song types or anything like that, but there are unique moments and feelings that are captured on certain songs that are not captured on any other in the track listing or in the recent output of deathcore for that matter. What Slaughter to Prevail make excellent use of are the possibilities of the dynamics between death metal and hardcore music, moving from segments where one is more prominent to segments where the other dominates, not dangling in one place of maximum comfort like most deathcore-playing bands seem to do. Their breakdowns are also particularly noteworthy for being few, but well-executed and not reminiscent of every other Whitechapel / Acacia Strain imitator out there. I hope they keep up the good work.

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