RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol V: God Forbid - Gone Forever

Yo this fucks
 

I've been trying to touch on every corner of this era when choosing albums for this series.  Shadows Fall was the collective macrogenre in a nutshell, Killswitch was the most standard metalcore band, Atreyu occupied the more radio-friendly and alternative side, et cetera.  So when it came time for "the heavy one", the obvious answer was Lamb of God but I've already covered their entire discography, so my brief research led me to two possibilities: God Forbid or Unearth.  I decided to go with God Forbid almost entirely because of the hilarious way Suffocation's Frank "The Tank" Mullen pronounces those two words on "Funeral Inception".

God Foopee is similar to Shadows Fall in the sense that they were actually fairly early to the party, forming in the mid/late 90s and not seeing success until nearly a decade later, and even then their success was pretty modest compared to most of their contemporaries.  Based on everything I've seen and read, they were always extremely respected by scene veterans and inadvertently acted as a great promotional tool since basically the entire northeastern American metal scene of the era opened for them at some point, but merely through bad luck they just never broke out above the second tier.

And that's kind of shocking because they honestly have one hell of a leg up on most of their contemporaries.  They were without a doubt the band with the most "metal cred" in the scene if you ask me.  While most bands I've covered so far seemed to play metalcore because they were simply influenced by other metalcore bands or did a very cut-and-dry blending of In Flames styled melodeath and emotional hardcore (in a way that kept the elements mostly separated, like a salad instead of a soup), God Foopee played metalcore seemingly by accident by playing hella fast paced melodeath closer to At the Gates or The Haunted with a massive dose of intense thrash metal and simply included breakdowns into the formula that came off sounding more like Pantera than Madball.  Every metalcore band was aggressive, but few of them were violent.  This unhinged sense of danger is something that Gone Forever absolutely fucking nails in a way that the All That Remainses of the world couldn't even imagine.  The clean parts are more effective here than anywhere else because they're so much more rare than usual and the heavy parts are so overwhelming and destructive.  

I've found myself focusing on vocals a lot in this series and I think that's because this scene had a weird problem with most bands featuring both harsh and clean vocals but basically no band being good at both of them (if either).  God Foopee is no different, with the cleans being clearly inferior to the screams, but I actually think the fact that the cleans are so rough adds to the authenticity.  Killswitch may have hit a home run with Jones's stunning cleans, and while brothers Doc "tor Death" and "Diamond" Dallas Coyle are several rungs below his smooth majesty, their more scratchy and less tonally punched-in cleans lend a level of sincerity to the music that no amount of theatrical histrionics could dream to match.  That "What are we waiting for?" part on "Force-Fed" sounds downright desperate, and the more intense than average music surrounding it helps them blend in so much more than the saccharine cleans of other bands.  Byron "The Butcher" Davis's screams, on the other hand, are some of the most caustic and vitriolic I've heard since undertaking this project.  He does the Shadows Fall thing of layering over himself quite frequently, but his scream is much more full and menacing than Fair's, so when the layering happens it sounds less like a studio trick to fill out the sound and more like a horde of pissed off minions preparing to eat your insides.  He doesn't dig deep into the death metal register or anything, but his mid range screams absolutely stand out from the pack due to the intense amount of rusted nails he chewed before tracking.  I can't stress enough how night-and-day the intensity of the vocals are here when compared to basically every other band in the scene.

That applies to the instrumental attack as well.  I may be overselling the speed of Gone Forever, but I'm not overselling the aggression.  "Washed Out World" has more clean vocals than it probably needs but check out that rollicking thrash riff 25 seconds in.  "Living Nightmare" kicks off with an incredibly mosh friendly riff before careening headfirst into a short double bass section that leads into a bloody-knuckled Pantera section.  Gone Forever just starts knocking teeth out from the word go and basically never stops.  Even the melodic choruses that every album needed by law in 2004 sound dirtier and more chaotic than I'd been getting used to.  There's a surprising amount of Nevermore in the sound as well, from the solos to the more skippy riffs to the way the clean vocals are delivered (even if they're wildly different from Warrel Dane's off-broadway overprojection), tons of signs point to that Seattle institution on here.  And just like with Trivium, the amount of epic 80s metal in here is surprising as well.  "Antihero" and "Soul Engraved" open with speedy riffs that were probably more inspired by Whoracle than anything else but they come off sounding like if In Flames was ripping off Judas Priest instead of Iron Maiden, if that makes sense.  The lithe riffs that zip along at high speed and the mid paced open string breakdowns are equally devastating, and I can't help but envision the band tearing the walls off of every venue with their bare hands when these songs are played live.  

If there's any flaw here, it's that the tracklist could've used a reshuffling, since the only two songs I don't really care for all that much are "Better Days" and "Perfect Lie" (the latter of which is super clunky and probably should've just been cut entirely), and they're unfortunately placed directly next to each other pretty early in the album.  Otherwise the disparate influences are all combined into a super taut package and delivered with an overwhelming amount of venom.  God Foopee gets bundled with Unearth mentally for me fairly often because they were both the two bands most frequently recommended to me back in the days I'm looking back on, and now that I've finally gotten around to giving them both good faith listens, I can say they both kicked ass at this niche and I regret passing on them the most.  I'm not gonna review Unearth but just imagine they got an identical review and score.

RATING: 84%