I knew which album I was going to end this series with way back when I got the idea to do it. Job for a Cowboy isn't strictly metalcore, per se, but they provide a nice narrative conclusion to the whole thing in my eyes. When nu metal died out, metalcore became the predominant heavy genre in the mainstream, and after few fruitful years at the top, it was eventually supplanted by deathcore. I don't consider JFAC to have invented the style or anything, I'm sure there were plenty of lesser known bands to blend those heavy breakdowns with more traditional death metal and add pig squeals on top before them (I tend to think of them more as one prong in the trident along with Whitechapel and As Blood Runs Black when it comes to bringing the genre to the forefront, but even then I'm sure somebody can make a convincing argument otherwise), but this was the first I had heard. It was the first that tons of people had heard, frankly. JFAC is the first band I can remember that truly hit it big off the back of Myspace popularity, the first band to utterly blow the minds of kids who were into heavy music but weren't interested in old shit from the 90s, the first to speed past mere "aggression" and land headfirst into utter "brutality". Us jaded internet folks understood that death metal had been a thing for like fifteen years at this point, but after spending the last few weeks completely immersed in early 2000s New England metalcore, I get it now. Killswitch Engage and All That Remains sound like shuddering pissbabies in the shadow of "Entombment of a Machine". If I hadn't had a cool mom and access to the internet and had instead followed the natural trajectory of Pantera > nu metal > metalcore, Doom would have wrecked my fucking brain too.
Looking back from the perspective of the wizened old know-it-all that I am today, I can pretty safely say that Doom is actually a fairly normal death metal EP for the most part. Take away the bree bree vocals and the breakdowns and this is fairly standard technical death metal, with ripping tremolo riffs and punishing blastbeats aplenty. It jumps around very often, never riding on a static section for more than a few seconds. The drums are constantly spazzing out in a dozen different directions, the riffs twist and slither all over the place, quickly snapping into place on a dime and constantly throwing power punches at you with little regard for a logical flow. It's chaotic and nasty, and the band's eventual progression into standard DM is much less surprising now that I'm revisiting this fifteen years later.
However, if this were regular death metal, it would have neither set the metalcore world on fire nor would it have drawn the ire of so many traditionalists. No, it earned the reputation it has because of those different elements, and their inclusion did indeed meaningfully change it into something beyond simple death metal. I'm not gonna pretend Autopsy didn't exist but let's be real, JFAC didn't include massive slamming breakdowns because of any traditional influence. In essence, what made Doom what it was was that it was musicked in a way that bent much closer to hardcore/metalcore than death metal. You don't listen to Cannibal Corpse the same way you listen to deathcore. Instead of taking in entire songs as a whole, with different riffs and motifs working in tandem with one another, you listened to relatively disconnected blasts of intensity as the song built and built and built until it finally burst with a massive, devastating breakdown. This is what Doom did spectacularly well, and if this had never gotten the grassroots success that it did then heavy music as a whole probably would've looked a hell of a lot different for a solid ten years.
Unfortunately, this is far from a perfect release. Hell it'd be a stretch to even call it "great". What Doom has going for it are two fantastic songs packaged along with three totally inconsequential snoozers. "Entombment of a Machine" is the iconic deathcore song, and it's earned that reputation. It's a four minute long cavalcade of chaotic blasting sprinkled in between gargantuan heaps of big stupid mosh riffs and big stupid breakdowns. It's a big stupid song and it turns out that JFAC's strength at this point in their career is just being big and stupid. This kind of knuckle dragging simplicity is beautiful in its primitiveness and the EP's greatest crime is that every song isn't like this. "Knee Deep" stands out as the other great one, and frankly it could've logically been written by a different band considering how much more normal it is. That one sports an opening riff that could've been written by fucking Deicide, and it absolutely rules. Like I said before, if the vocals were different nobody would've bat an eye at this song, because that's really the only thing nontraditional about it.
The other three songs? Eh, they're all fine but that's about it. Opening with "Entombment of a Machine" was a brilliant choice because it instantly smacked you in the face with a sound that was genuinely new to most people and was the strongest song anyway, but it also carries the unfortunate burden of setting expectations way too high for the rest of the album. "The Rising Tide" has like three separate moments where the band drops out and you know when they come back they're gonna fuckin' slam their hearts out but they just... don't. They come crashing back in with more or less run-of-the-mill death metal with some heavier chugs interspersed in from time to time. This happens time and time again, and it wouldn't really be a problem if these other tracks were as good as "Knee Deep" but they just aren't despite being fundamentally similar. I remember their first full length, Genesis being a shock to me at the time because there was nothing deathcore about it and it was just straight ahead death metal with no twists, but going back to check out this debut EP 15 years later reveals that they had pretty much telegraphed that they'd be totally pedestrian without those breakdowns and pig squeals and that already took up the lion's share of what they were doing. "Entombment" was so ubiquitous and so iconic that I think we all collectively tricked ourselves into thinking the entirety of Doom sounded like that, because it categorically does not. And that's not to say that it's only good because of the deathcore cliches necessarily, because they'd go on to prove with Ruination that they fucking smoked when they shifted to a more tech death style, but it's probably not a coincidence that The Big Stupid is where all of the most memorable parts of this album can be found. I bet you don't remember a single note of "Relinquished" but you all know that ridiculous screech in the intro to "Entombment" whether you want to or not.
Doom didn't kill the more melodic side of metalcore by any stretch, tons of iconic albums in that style came out after this (All That Remains had their biggest hit a full year after this came out and the hands down best As I Lay Dying album was released two years later), but I do see it as the signal flare. It wasn't the nail in the coffin, but it was the writing on the wall, the changing of the tides, anybody paying attention to this scene knew that things were going to change for the heavier, and Doom is what opened their eyes to the possibilities. Job themselves more or less stepped aside and let Suicide Silence or whoever lead the charge but I'd say it's pretty uncontroversial to say they got the ball rolling here. At the time, I hated this for what it represented: a total bastardization of a style of music that I loved, taking my beloved death metal and ruining it with dumbass 60bpm breakdowns and bree bree vocals, but nowadays I appreciate it more for what it is than for what it isn't, and even then it's mostly pretty average on the whole. And after listening to that New England style for a few weeks solid, I totally understand what made this such a smash hit at the time. This must've been what it felt like to hear loads of late 80s Anthrax and Exodus for years before stumbling into Altars of Madness.
RATING: 70%
Good take. What did you give it at the end?
ReplyDeleteLol I can't believe I forgot that
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