Whitechapel - The Valley

Though still one of deathcore’s most widely revered names, Whitechapel’s reputation as a steadfast bastion of the best the genre has to offer has been on a slow decline for the past few years with the slower, more groove-focused approach of their more recent albums. And while I’m not by any means a purist who believes that their old way is the one true way for them to do deathcore, their more recent efforts have not been super effective as far as being convincing of their similar strength in their more groovy side of deathcore is concerned.

Any quick side-by-side of albums like Mark of the Blade or Our Endless Warnext to the likes of their self-titled album, This Is Exile, or even A New Era of Corruption reveals readily how much more of a knack the band have for brutality through intense, ripping pace than they do for the djenty groove their contemporaries are drawn to like moths to light. While the band do have a few strong examples of indulgent 8-string groove to their name like “The Saw Is the Law” and “I, Dementia”, most of their grittier, faster material outshines their djenty stuff, and this is coming from a real sucker for anything akin to Meshuggah. The past few albums have just reinforced how much stronger Whitechapel is at quick, relentless, hardcore-inspired death metal than common djenty deathcore, and instead of backing up and doing what repeated trials have shown to be their strength, Whitechapel opted for a curveball on their seventh LP.

The Valley is an inconsistent dabbling in more melodic styles than what the band usually opt for, most notably in the vocal department with Phil Bozeman making prominent use of clean vocals on several tracks. Most of these brief episodes of departure, which seem adventurous at face value, wind up simply taking from alternative metal’s playbook and doing little of anything interesting to that style or in cohesion with Whitechapel’s style of deathcore, the more recent form of which they frequently pedal back to as though preemptively performing damage control. Maybe seeing the reception Suicide Silence got for their use of clean singing made Whitechapel only want to dip their toes in the water.

Of the ten songs on the album, only three feature this “bold” stylistic departure. The clean guitar sections and clean vocals on the opening track, “When a Demon Defiles a Witch”, are meager passes at a more proggy and eccecntric approach, nothing special or beyond surface-level experimentation, but not entirely off-putting. But the melodic hardcore vocals on the track are completely out of place with the rest of the song’s traditional, speedy Whitechapel deathcore pummeling. The song “Hickory Creek” is undoubtedly the most uncharacteristically neutered and shockingly radio-friendly Whitechapel have ever sounded; they sound like fucking Five Finger Death Punch when they try to do power ballads, especially with the tone of Phil’s layered baritone cleans. And while it’s still more gutsy than anything Ivan Moody and company are doing these days, the basic, formulaic structure and generic alt metal ballad ideas poured in over Bozeman’s unimpressive crooning just diminishes the emotive impact the band were definitely going for. “Third Depth” sees the band returning to trying to balance heavier instrumentation and Bozeman’s deathly growls with his zoned-out clean singing and basic-ass spacy alternative rock backing, and it makes for such a meandering cut. I’m glad it’s not as structurally formulaic as “Hickory Creek”, but it sounds like the only idea the band had going into the song was using Phil’s cleans and growls on the same track, which is hardly revolutionary and makes for hardly a thrilling juxtaposition either.

When the band backpedal and stick to what they do well on fast-paced blazers like “Forgiveness Is Weakness”, the filthy growl-heavy groove of “Brimstone”, and the blackened death guitar storm of “Lovelace” they come closer to sounding like they’ve captured the glory of their old raw power. And although it’s a bit repetitive, the song “Black Bear” even shows the band working well with more of the mid-paced djenty groove that has characterized their more recent work. The closing track, “Doom Woods”, makes use of a more sprawling structure, which the band have worked well with and do work well with again here, but the alternative rock guitar flair serves as an irritating distraction on what is clearly meant to be, and otherwise serves decently as, a bombastic finale for the album.

Overall, The Valley is a very disjointed experience and one that I don’t really know what the band were trying to achieve with it. While its momentary similarities to Five Finger Death Punch are certainly haunting omens, there’s nothing quite as horribly phoned-in here as that band’s past several albums. But still, this album plays like a band having an identity crisis in a limbo between an increasingly more stale style they seem to have played out and some contrived sense of evolution beyond their genre altogether. And while those sound like very harsh words for an album that’s by no means similarly harsh on the ears, Whitechapel have been a frustratingly unreliable figurehead for a subgenre that seems to constantly be on the defensive and in need of its biggest names to step up to the plate, not because the band are switching up, but because they have been coasting on their legacy for the past few average to above-average-at-best albums now. And unfortunately even as they try new things with not a whole lot of conviction, they are continuing to gradually reshape their legacy to one that reads of them being a flash in the pan that fans have stared at too long in hopes of sparking again.

Here goes nothing/10