If you’re going to make some asshat claim that your band invented metalcore to get publicity for your upcoming album, that album should probably at least sound like more than generic, band-wagoning alternative metal with a dash of melodic metalcore. That post I made last week about genres being important was partly inspired by the idiotic comment Atreyu’s Alex Varkatzas made about being the inventors of metalcore. The ploy of making bold public statements for the sake of headlines surrounding an upcoming release is an old tactic that I and most metalheads are probably used to at this point, even if it’s still groan-inducing a lot of the time. But the asinine claim Varkatzas made were based on warping the understanding of genres, basically intentionally trying to break a tool the metal community uses to discuss music. And of course people were quick to let the band know this, pointing to metallic hardcore’ s progenitors like Converge and Botch, as well as melodic metalcore’s well-ackno...
I had no idea Carnifex had a new EP in the works, but by chance I have been listening to them a lot during my exercise lately (their 2016 album, Slow Death , especially), so this EP that dropped this Friday ended up being quite a timely surprise for me. It’s a pretty minor, 4-track release from them, we get one original song (the titular track), a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole”, a cover of Slipknot’s “The Heretic Anthem”, and a Gost-remixed version of their Nine Inch Nails cover. The EP starts with the band’s original song “Bury Me in Blasphemy”, a pretty standard cut for the band at this point in their evolution, much like something that might have showed up on Slow Death . I like the main groove and the big riff that rounds the song off in tandem with a string section. Well-mixed, well-supplemented with what what sound like synthetic strings and even horns at some points, and sufficiently brutal, it’s a satisfying little bonus addition to ...
I haven’t listened to a full Nonpoint album since being slightly intrigued about them after a friend showed me their song “Bullet with a Name”. It was a long-ass time ago and I remember listening to more of their stuff and not being impressed. And if young, low-standards, baby metalhead me wasn’t impressed in 2008, that probably says a lot. Nevertheless, I figured I’d give their new album here a shot to see what they could do with a full length ten years later. At first, I didn’t know why the hell they decided to title it what Ed Sheeran also titled his last, unavoidable album, but then I found out and I knew it wasn’t going to be good. I voiced once before on here, a while ago, that I find it so overdone, boring, lazy, and not special anymore when bands just title their albums based on how many albums they have now. It so often comes off like a lazy bit of chest-puffing, like “look how much we’ve done now”. Hollywood Undead’s album last year, Five , was the worst thing I heard...
Comments
Post a Comment