Crossfaith - Apocalyze

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME

I'm... I'm speechless here.  Really, it's a rare feat to render a narcissist like me catatonic, but... damn.

I suppose I can start with something simple like the history of the band, eh?  Uhh... well, Crossfaith got their start in Osaka around 2006, and have released three albums to date, with this, Apocalyze being the third and most recent, coming out in 2013, and....

Fucking Christ this is such a strangely awfulsome album.

Look, I know nothing at all about this band.  I snagged this album on a whim because I like Japanese metal and that was the extent of my thought process.  I figured I'd be getting a darker Blood Stain Child, based on the "industrial metalcore" tag, since the metal part of metalcore is frequently melodeath anyway.  What I got instead was (and I swear I'm not making this up) a mashup of Disarmonia Mundi, The Browning, Limp Bizkit, modern pop, and dance music with the occasional obnoxious Skrillex-style bass wobble.  It's like some dastardly, Frankensteinian experiment to attract as many swagfag douchetards imaginable by just dominating every possible terrible style of music they might potentially listen to.  Seriously, the fact that Flo Rida doesn't have a guest verse is a mystery to me.

On one hand, it's the worst music I've ever heard, on the other hand, it's really adorably retarded in an almost cute way, not unlike a puppy.  I mean, I give the band credit in the sense that the music is almost never a weird, slapdash, stitched-together hodgepodge of styles, and instead manages to incorporate all of these bizarre influences into one cohesive sound.  There's almost no Winds of Plague style awkward switches in tone (though there are a few, as is almost inevitable with such a mixed pool of influences), which is commendable when working with such a head scratchingly diverse sound.  The breakdowns sound like they belong, the keys don't feel tacked on and superfluous, everything has its place in the machine and every member of the band is properly utilized, which again, is commendable if only for the fact that most weird, genre hopping bands so frequently fuck that up.

But back to that first hand, it's well thought out, but it's still a terrible idea.  You ever listen to a guy rant for hours about how every job interview should involve a test in equestrianism because of all the positive leadership it shows? (No? Just me?) That dude could have researched this for years, done studies, and personally believed the absolute hell out of this, and he could be incredibly well spoken and persuasive, but at the end of the day it's still a goddamn confusing and dumb idea.  That's what Crossfaith embodies to me, a very well articulated argument in favor of a blisteringly stupid idea.

If you can seriously explain to me a scenario where Nu Flames would be greatly improved with a funky Korn riff and an uplifting David Guetta chorus, I'll promptly remove my penis (which is undoubtedly made of lego pieces and shaped like a parrot) and eat it, because clearly we're living in a dream universe.  Despite all these strange examples I'm throwing out there (none of which I'm being facetious about), every song manages to be structured exactly the same, with identical tempos and almost every song length falling in the same twenty second window.  I mean, it's diverse, with some songs being pretty much straight up nu metal ("Hounds of the Apocalypse", "Gala Hala (Burn Down the Floor)"), while others are much more rooted in late era Gothenburg melodeath ("We Are the Future", "Countdown to Hell", "Only the Wise can Control Our Eyes"), while others are basically Linkin Park type pop songs ("Eclipse", "Counting Stars") while all having a huge slathering of dance synths over the top and brostep breakdowns sprinkled throughout, but at the same time it's homogenous, with so many of these clearly different songs with wildly varied influences sounding exactly the same as one another.  I fully expected this to suck once I realized the kind of music I would actually be getting, but man I would have at least expected it to be interesting.  You know, at least in some kind of wacky Mr. Bungle or Big Dumb Face type way, but no, we don't even get that.  We get Blood Stain Child's eccentric little cousin who's less into that weeaboo shit and more into masculine stuff like lifting weights, shutter shades, and lip tattoos.

The fact that there are Skrillex wobble breakdowns, and not one or two, I mean on damn near every single song, is just a complete dead giveaway that this band is manufactured and really and truly is trying to appeal to everybody at once, and in some utterly catastrophic way... it works.  I don't know, this is a really conflicting album for me because it's clearly unspeakably horrawful, but at the same time I could totally see myself putting it on of my own volition once this review is done.  It's so odd, the more I listen, the more I realize that the main influence on this band was probably a mix of Disarmonia Mundi and Linkin Park, two bands I really cannot stand for the life of me, but between the chugging riffs, the string skipping "that melodeath" riff (you know which one I'm talking about), the rap breakdowns, the heavy scratching, chunky bass, guest autotuned female vocals, WUBWUBWUBWUBWU-U-U-U-U-UB and all that, there's some endearing character behind it.  I can't explain why, I readily acknowledge that this is some transcendentally crappy music, but for some reason I just kinda like it.  I like how earnest the band is about their shitty genre blend, I like how well they mix all of these shitty ideas together, I really like some of the straightforward and more stupid riffs (like the main riffs of "Eclipse" or "The Evolution"), I like how aggressive and unabashedly brazen the band is with their one-dimensionality.  I dunno, it's well put together, but it just consists of god awfully wretched components.  Think of something like Turmion Kätilöt as covered by Far East Movement (Forget about those guys already?  Not on my watch!).

So I've done nothing but namedrop terrible bands and describe the music in the most unappealing terms possible from the standpoint of a metal fan, but at the same time I've continually praised the band for some intangible reason that even I can't explain fully.  I think I'm just going to chalk it up to shitty taste and then run back to my HORSE the Band records, but the point stands that there is at least some appeal here.  Keep in mind I listen to Touhou cover albums and think Nightwish is pretty alright, but if you're not a fan of overly sugary synths, incessant dance beats, aggressive melodeath, bouncy rap rhythms, brostep, or uplifting Swedish happy hardcore, you're not going to find anything to like here.  The fact that this band is apparently on Warped Tour this year shows that they're finding their target demographic somewhere, and they have at least some level of crossover exposure here in the States.  It's confusing and I still don't know how this band came to exist or why I find myself humming these melodies so strongly.

It sucks, but it'll get stuck in your head.


RATING - GO FUCK YOURSELF

The Browning - The Browning

It's a rifle made out of steak that shoots feces

I'm going to give a little bit of personal history here, so bear with me.  Years ago, I hated deathcore.  I was one of the hundreds of thousands of metal fans who found the genre to be populated by talentless wastes purely because by dumb luck I had only heard bad bands within the genre (crap like Emmure, Oceano, Carnifex, and the like).  After hearing Burning the Masses and All Shall Perish (two of the least -core deathcore bands by the way.  If you haven't found any bands in the genre you like, give those two a shot), I decided/realized I was being a tool and asked a few of my buddies for recommendations.  One of them sent me a Mediafire folder with like 15 albums he said I should try.  There were more misses than hits that I can remember, stuff like Chelsea Grin and Disfiguring the Goddess that I just didn't like at all, but there was one that really stuck with me, and that was The Browning.  Maybe it was the strange and to this day unexplained name that caught my eye initially, or perhaps it was the fact that the album cover was nothing more than an old clock face.  No big dripping, brutish logo, no intricate artwork of a man getting impaled with a railroad spike, just this plain blue clock.  I don't know why, but it was striking to me at the time, and so I was interested before I had even heard a note of the band's music.

What followed upon clicking "play" was nothing short of a miracle for me.

I didn't call it at the time, but nary a few months later, I was sure that The Browning was going to be huge, possibly even the "next big thing".  The trendsetter, the band that spawned countless imitators, and I'm still of the belief that we're only a few years away from that groundswell.  I mean, it took how many years for any notable Meshuggah knockoffs to rise to prominence?  Something that nobody else has done takes a while to catch on, and The Browning's self titled record is certainly something entirely unique, and it's only a matter of time before the imitators begin pushing forth.  The Browning specialize in a style that is almost entirely electronica + breakdowns, and I would have never guessed such a style would work until happening upon this unsung gem.

I'm not particularly well versed in the several squintillion subniches of electronic music, so I can't really specifically tell you what kind of electronic influence you're getting (though from what I can gather, trance and hardstyle are the two most prominent).  Tracks like "Time Will Tell" and "Judgment" have almost house music styled melodies (though the drumming keeps it grounded in a soundly more rock territory) while "A Better Way" and "Taken for Granted" go for more subtle and atmospheric synths.  I initially saw the band marketed as dubstep + deathcore, which really isn't true at all.  I suspect it was purely a marketing strategy since dubstep was certainly the hot new thing in 2010-2011, since the only trace of what we know as dubstep can be found in the track "Ashamed", from their 2011 release, Burn this World.

And with that I have to bring up that album.  I don't know why, but the band seems to have disowned this self titled, or at the very least doesn't consider it their debut full length (if they consider it an EP or something I don't know why, it's 10 tracks and over 33 minutes long), since Burn this World is being treated like their debut.  There is a clear difference between the two albums for me, and that's that the electronic influence on Burn this World is more straightforward and dance oriented, whereas on the self titled it's more dialed back on the whole and has a more atmospheric mindset behind it.  It's no coincidence that the only two tracks from this that survived to their more widely known successor ("Standing on the Edge" and "Time Will Tell") are also the most straightfoward and... well danceable (for lack of a better term).  Something like "Taken for Granted" would have never fit on that record, and that's one of the reasons I find this self titled to be superior.  It's special in the sense that this was during that sweet spot during the band's early life when they had both an abundance of ideas and also a clue about what they were good at.  If you really want to hear some truly horrid stuff, go check out the reeeeeally early stuff when it was even more simplistic, more electronic, and featured some laughably wretched rapping.  But at this point in their career, they had it narrowed down to "electronic stuff and hardcore stuff", before Burn this World when it was narrowed down even further to simply "dance beats and breakdowns".

With that said, it's a bit of a strange paradox because the best songs are actually the more in-your-face and catchy/dancy ones.  "Standing on the Edge", "Time Will Tell", "Suit and Tie", and "These Nightmares" are easily my favorites, with the other four traditional songs being more of their own collaborative entity known as "the songs in between the great ones".  And even though they aren't the "great" ones, they're by no means the "bad" ones, they just don't stand out as much.  For an album I obviously adore to bits, it's weird to say that a little under half of it comes off as unmemorable filler, but when I sit down and really think about it, it kind of does.  "A Better Way" is the best of the four in that category, thanks to some really awesome bouncy synths in the chorus, but it still ends up getting a bit lost in the static since it precedes the stellar trio of "Time Will Tell", "Suit and Tie", and "These Nightmares".  "Suit and Tie" is the best of that triumvirate, being one of the only songs that sees the guitars not base their parts entirely around breakdowns.  I like my music fast and melodic, and that is definitely the fastest and most melodic song on the album.  Plus the section that starts at 1:17 is just goddamn awesome.  It makes me get up and mosh with nobody every time I hear it.  If you can't dig that, you're dead to me.

The more subtle touches are also a great feature that the band lost as time went on.  The two instrumental passages, "Inner Mission" and "Remnant", are incredibly good.  I could easily hear those tracks being in Goldeneye 64, and if you've ever played that game or heard these songs you know exactly what I'm talking about.  The subtle, swelling synths and the slow, almost creepy piano melodies work extraordinarily well.  It's strange because the more subtle songs don't stand out as much while the big and loud ones hit hard and resonate strongly, but when they just go all out in either direction they land right on the money.  Again, it's the more diverse songwriting displayed on this seemingly buried independent self titled that makes it stand a head above the major label debut.  

I'm failing hard on describing why this rules so much, so I suppose I'll just wrap it up here.  I'm incredibly hipstery about this band.  My favorite album is the one before they got signed to a major label, I "liked" their Facebook page when they had ~600 likes (it's currently sitting at 70,533 as of the time of this writing (to put that in perspective, Gorgoroth has 62,193 and Sigh has less than 5,000)), and I just harp to everybody who brings them up how I totally called their future popularity before they struck it big.  The Browning write big, dumb, catchy tunes and that's undeniably what they're best at, but when they let a few other ideas seep in, they capture a kind of magic that nobody else at the time had managed to ensnare so marvelously.  Despite my opening paragraph, there's no metal influence here, so anybody calling this deathcore or anything of the sort is completely wrong.  It's hard to go into detail as to what makes the band and album so great, because it really can be summed up succinctly and accurately as "breakdowns and light techno beats complementing one another".  That's what's on display, and it's fucking stupendous.


RATING - 88%