RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol VI: Avenged Sevenfold - Waking the Fallen

They still ripped off Chaly though
 

Well we're nearing the end of this series.  My initial plan was to do ten reviews because that seemed like a nice round number and there are more than enough albums to relisten to from this era of my life, but over time I wound up shaving it down to seven for a couple reasons.  I was gonna touch on The Fall of Ideals by All That Remains because it would pull double duty and allow me to rewrite an old review, but really I'd just be repeating the Killswitch review so it wouldn't be interesting.  I was gonna tackle a Chimaira album but honestly all three of the ones I listened to just bored me to tears and I only managed to get through a full listen once and that was purely because I had it on in the background while I zoned out and played Dynasty Warriors.  And lastly I cut out Bullet For My Valentine because other than pointing out how much the clean vocals sounded like Green Day I just didn't have anything interesting to say about it.  This isn't exactly relevant to the review, but this is gonna be a LOTB exclusive since Avenged Sevenfold isn't listed on MA so I wanted to take this opportunity to meander a bit and give a look behind the curtain in case any readers thought I left out some obvious candidates.  For the curious, my opinions on the three albums I cut are "lame", "bad", and "meh", in order.

On topic, I have a bit of a confession to make, I'm not entirely unfamiliar with A7X here, because I've long been a defender of their third record, City of Evil.  Even when I first heard it, back when the band was persona non grata for metal fans, I thought it was a weird flukey home run where every dumb element of their sound just worked.  It was fun, it was fast, it was catchy, it was and is a brilliantly well written slice of modern hard rock/metal that stood head and shoulders above the shitty metalcore they started with and the overblown Guns n' Roses imitation they'd go on to milk to death.  But the dirty little secret here is that I had never actually known any of their other albums beyond like two songs across seven albums or whatever.  They just weren't worth listening to, who the fuck cares about a group of dorks who dress like Good Charlotte, give themselves dumb names like "Zacky", and rip off Overkill's mascot?

The extremely obvious revelation I'm leading to is that holy shit Avenged Sevenfold is genuinely good and I think I'm just an unironic fan now.  Despite always kinda-secretly liking City of Evil this was genuinely the band I had the lowest expectations for based on my memory.  But man I'd be lying if I said I hadn't gone back to listen to Waking the Fallen more than a few times since the original relisten, not because I needed to take notes or anything, but just because I wanted to hear it again.

The thing that stands out the most is something that I remember hating the most as a kid, funnily enough.  M. "Night" Shyadowlan easily, and I mean fucking easily stands out as the best vocalist of all the bands I've covered in this series.  Back when I was 14 I remember hearing a song or two and thinking he was super whiny and then switching the music to Angel Witch without a shred of irony.  Hearing so many lame, weak, dry, or tuneless vocalists in a row really makes his skill incredibly fucking obvious and I have no idea why I hated him at the time.  His cleans have a lot of grit to them and he carries a tune extremely well, even showcasing a surprising range on "I Won't See You Tonight part 1".  His harsh vocals, while dropped entirely after this album, are very good as well.  They're extremely venomous and sound like they're coming straight from the gut despite being on the higher end of the register.  I focused on vocals so much throughout this series because it seemed like nobody could get the harsh/clean combo right and they so frequently took center stage, but Avenged Fucking Sevenfold of all god damned bands winds up being literally the only one to nail it and my jaw is still on the floor.

Even the instrumental side excels in a way that most of the other bands couldn't.  They are by no means the most aggressive or heaviest band in the genre (their drift away from metalcore to a more hard rock and (apparently) progressive metal direction over the years isn't really surprising) but these guys are incredibly fucking tight songwriters.  Despite the length of these songs, they have the girth to make it worthwhile.  The typical metalcore breakdown of open string chugs in perfect time with a rapid fire bass drum shows up plenty of times here, with "Unholy Confessions" sporting probably the most basic one to ever exist, but they hit surprisingly hard whenever they show up and more often than not the band will just subvert them by slamming down a meaty groove that smacks more of Pantera than anybody else instead.  Waking the Fallen runs through a lot of different moods, from caustic bursts like "Unholy Confessions" and "Eternal Rest" to melodic anthems like "Chapter Four" to mournful ballads like "I Won't See You Tonight".  That last one actually hammers the Pantera comparison home even further, since it's technically a two-parter, with the first part being a slow ballad and the second part being a shotgun blast of aggression.  There's absolutely no way that wasn't intentionally modeled off "Suicide Note", right?  Am I crazy?  Regardless, the album ebbs and flows between all of these different approaches and for the first time in a half dozen reviews a band actually manages to be good at all of them.  I seriously can't get over how much I like "Chapter Four".  Seriously, I'd be willing to consider that as my favorite song in the entire genre.  There is barely a wasted second on that one and every stupid element of it hits bullseye, and I'm saying that with full acknowledgment of the completely pointless section that repeats a ten note chug pattern eight times in a row.  It (and the rest of the album, frankly) is so basic that it should just be corny schlock, but there is so much sincerity here that I can't help but adore it.  That chorus is just fucking sublime with that incredible vocal hook coupled with the sliding octaves on the guitar in the background.  In comparison to their peers, Avenged Sevenfold doesn't have a single new or novel idea in their collective head but they played their fucking hearts out and torqued the lugnuts so damned tight that they wound up writing a dozen songs that effortlessly steamrolled everybody else trying to make metalcore accessible.  

I do have one complaint though, and it should be obvious to anybody familiar with both this album and my reviews in general: it's way too fucking long.  No metal album should get this close to the 70 minute mark unless every single song is a standout on its own, and Waking the Fallen is not immune to this criticism.  There are a lot of different ideas here but they're all pretty well worn and the album works best as a unit despite a few standout tracks.  So as a result it really does start to blur together after the first handful of tracks, which isn't the biggest problem since I think this works pretty well as a unit but it's a problem nonetheless.  The good news is that none of the tracks themselves feel too long, which is shocking considering the shortest one (barring the intro) is still only a few seconds shy of five minutes, and three of them breach the seven minute mark (with the first part of "I Won't See You Tonight" stretching out to nine), so the arduous runtime isn't really the end of the world since I was entertained the whole time at the very least.

Really, I didn't see this coming, but Waking the Fallen is genuinely the best of the bunch here.  My lifelong love of Pantera helps me appreciate the stomping groove metal parts, my lifelong love of Guns n' Roses helps me appreciate the overblown epic parts where Synyster "Bill" Gates goes fucking feral on his fretboard (though they wouldn't fully lean into this until later), and my lifelong... well indifference to melodeath helps me appreciate the heavy parts simply because they're so much better than the legions of mediocre trend chasers that defined this era of music.  The word I keep coming back to in my head that I've been trying not to overuse is "tight".  Waking the Fallen is simply a remarkably well written album in a style that was absolutely saturated with mediocre chumps pumping out first draft songs and cashing in, delivered with enough sincerity to turn the corny simplicity into something truly endearing.  All this really needed was a bit of a fat trim and maybe dropping one or two songs entirely and this would genuinely be a classic, and I'm not kidding.

I wouldn't have bothered with this series if I wound up thinking everything still sucked just as much as I thought it did when I was a teenager, but really, the fact that Trivium and Avenged Sevenfold, the two bands I vocally hated the most, wound up being the ones that surprised me the most and churned out some genuinely great albums (Heafy's awful vocals are literally the only thing dragging Ascendancy's score down, remember) is seriously not at all what I expected.  I figured it'd be Killswitch, honestly, since I've been a fan of As I Lay Dying ever since 2007, but the world is really fucking weird and here we are.  Avenged Sevenfold is Good Actually.  Feel free to hold that against me forever if you wish, I'm not backing down, I genuinely adore this album.

RATING: 89%

 

 

(Pre-Publication Edit: Since writing this I've started listening to their other albums.  The self titled is actually worse than bad, it's exactly as awful as I remembered their metalcore era being when I was a kid, oddly enough.  Nightmare was much better, it was super corny but very City of Evil if it had a huge shot of the Black Album in it, though there were way too many shitty ballads that dragged it down a ton.  Still gotta check the rest but that's three albums I'll stand up for now so yeah I guess I'm just a fan after all, whoda thunk)

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%

RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol IV: Trivium - Ascendancy

I'm not making the boat rudder joke
 

I've recently learned about the theory that the kind of music you hate the most tends to actually be superficially similar to the kind you love the most.  Your natural assumption would be that somebody's least favorite style of music is the one the most opposite to their favorite, but ask any outlaw country fan what they think of Florida Georgia Line, or any jazz fan what they think of Kenny G's schlock.  Most pertinent to this series, ask any underground metalhead in 2005 what the worst genre was and they'd probably say metalcore.  The idea is that this is due to a sort of "musical uncanny valley", where you hate what you hate the most because it's almost something you love, but something about it is just too off, too artificial, too wrong to truly be what it is you love, and that gives us a sort of fight-or-flight reaction of visceral disgust.  I've been thinking about this a lot as I explore these metalcore bands for this series, and I think Trivium here is the poster child for metal's uncanny valley.  I know I spend a lot of time harping on how metalloids are obsessed with aesthetics and reflexively reject bands that don't look the part, and I still think that's true to an extent, but this way of thinking has really helped me to understand why this entire scene got shat on by the underground for so long, and Trivium in particular got it real bad.  They were an internet punching bag for years and I didn't even really question it.  Of course they sucked, I mean come on, have you listened to them?

 

I didn't start this series with the intention of pointing at maligned releases and just saying "Thing Good, Actually", but it was inevitable that it would happen at least once and I'm just as surprised as you are that Trivium wound up being the lucky winner.

The reason I think Trivium hit that musical uncanny valley more than any of their peers is because holy shit I never realized how 80s these songs are.  Seriously!  There are loads of things for classic metal fans to enjoy here, mostly in the absolute heaps of influence they took from Metallica and Iron Maiden.  The Crusade is obviously their "We're thrash now for real please respect us" album, but Ascendancy is the one I remember being their breakthrough and the one that started all the backlash, and I can see why people had that reaction to it.  Sure there are tons of dueling solos and harmonized melodies and bona fide thrash riffs, but there is enough that's just left-of-center enough to feel inauthentic.  Something simple is the fact that the album is played in Drop D tuning.  For the non musicians, all you really need to know is that dropped tunings simply aren't the approach that most bands take if they're aiming for the sound Trivium was aiming for here.  That's more the domain of grunge, nu metal, and, well, metalcore.  It's very easy to get huge sounding powerchords that jump around the neck with that top string down a step and it's conducive to writing big fuckin' breakdowns and really fast chug riffs (both of which this album doesn't necessarily shy away from, in fairness).  Hearing somebody take that tuning and basically rewrite "Trapped Under Ice" with it just feels different, and even if you don't know or understand all that, your brain picks up on it.  The tuning isn't the be-all-end-all wrong part, but it's one element of several that divorces Ascendancy from its roots just enough to feel like some sort of forgery.

But honestly, it's not really an impostor because the music is surprisingly legit.  That opening attack of "Rain" is absolutely devastating, "Drowned and Torn Asunder" is genuinely just thrash metal with a beefier low end, "Declaration" sounds like a squadron of machine guns, "A Gunshot to the Head of Trepidation" has a main riff that sports an incredibly infectious hook and transitions into some of the most Maiden melodies that Maiden never wrote.  Everywhere I look there's something else I enjoy.  My memory told me this had very pedestrian drumming but it's actually mega energetic, and the solos are some of the best the genre ever produced.  The sound is great, the songs generally smash (though of course the more melodic ballady songs like "Departure" and "Dying in Your Arms" are incredibly boring and throw a monkey wrench in the album's momentum), hell even the common problem of bands strictly adhering to pop song structures isn't as obvious or irritating this time, even though they pump out a lot of standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-solo-chorus songs regardless.  There's enough variety in approach that it doesn't get nearly as tiring as it did with Killswitch.  The cliches are still here of course, the choruses are almost uniformly cleanly sung and the most intense part of any given song is the first fifteen seconds, but it feels less dogmatic and more loose here.

However there's an elephant in the room here.  I haven't brought up the vocals yet, and that's because "Beefy" Matt Heafy has the absolute worst scream in the scene.  His harsh vocals are unbearably inept, to the point where they genuinely hinder my enjoyment to a surprising degree.  His cleans are fine, unremarkable but serviceable, but his harsh vocals are leagues below anybody else I've heard so far.  They're very hoarse and scratchy, like somebody running their nails down drywall.  He sounds like he was moderately thirsty but decided to track every single song in one long take before getting a glass of water.  I like to imagine his clean voice is his only real voice, and the screams are just the result of something like that Finnish cough drop commercial where the black metal guy takes a lozenge and then starts singing like Pavarotti.  That bit at the end of the second verse of "Pull Harder on the Strings of Your Martyr" where he goes "I'LL BURN YOUR WOLLL" sounds drier than Ben Shapiro's wife.  More than anything, Trivium needed to tell Heafy to just stick to guitar while they hired a real vocalist, because he's pretty good at guitar and unbelievably bad at vocals.  I know Trivium is still releasing new albums to this day and I hope to god he's either improved or dropped them entirely to focus on clean singing, because god damn I can not stress enough how awful they are.  Imagine starting a thrash band and then letting some kid who has never screamed before but was into Terror last summer handle the vocals, because that's not too far off from what we got here.

It's such a shame that the vocals are as bad as they are, because they're really the only element of the album that I actually think sucks.  On an instrumental level Ascendancy sits somewhere in the high 70s/low 80s range; not great but it's consistently quite good.  But those screams are so prominent and so bad that they seriously shave off like twenty fuckin' percent off the final score for me.  Running classic non-extreme metal through a filter of modern melodeath that makes it both heavier and catchier should be easy as hell to do, but the vocal choices they made here just amount to a stake through the heart.

RATING: 62%

RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol. III: Atreyu - The Curse

I am not sober enough to think of a title
 

I'm going to preemptively dock ten points off this score because listening to it several times across the span of a few days is likely going to irreparably fuck up my Spotify recommendations.

 

Like most bands in this series, I'm mostly totally unfamiliar with Atreyu.   I know I hated them before I ever listened to them just because I knew they weren't "true metal" (and correcting that is the whole point of this series) and I remember "Right Side of the Bed" very vaguely from the soundtrack to Burnout 3, but that's all I got.  This is likely the blindest blind listen I'm going to cover, because even though I wouldn't call myself all that familiar with Killswitch, I'm almost positive I've heard "A Bid Farewell" more than a handful of times throughout my life.  Not so with this one.  So because of that, I actually did some research into the band's history before starting this one.  And in doing so I came across this hilarious quote from frontman "Howlin'" Alex Varkatzas:

"This is going to sound a little cocky but I’m a singer in a band. I don’t think we fit into any genre. I think we are hard to pin down. When we first started it was a little easier. We were a metallic hardcore band with singing parts. There wasn’t any else like that when we were doing it. People get confused and say ‘you’re a metalcore band’, but we invented metalcore. That may sound cocky but I don’t care. We pre-date Poison The Well and Killswitch Engage and all those bands. I’ve been doing this since I was literally 12 years old."

 

What kind of coconuts shit is this?  For my metal readers, this is like Dark Angel saying they invented thrash metal despite very obviously not doing so while also claiming they didn't fit into any genre despite being the musical lovechild of Kreator and Slayer.  For Sobek's sake I started this series with fuckin' Shadows Fall, who formed three years before Atreyu did and released their third album the same year Atreyu released their debut.  Yeah it's not apples to apples to compare the two bands but they unquestionably had some fan overlap and there's absolutely no way this pinhead didn't know he was spewing bullshit.  Though, in his defense, if any genre was invented by twelve year olds, it's metalcore.

Extramusical nonsense aside, does The Curse hold up, and did I do myself a disservice by ignoring it when it was culturally relevant?

Well that's a hard fuckin' no this time.

Of the entire batch of bands I checked out for this series, Atreyu is by far the worst one.  I hate to blow my wad early but here we are.  My issue with Killswitch is amplified here to the bazillionth degree.  Not only do they constantly reuse songwriting cliches and cause the tracks to bleed together into a totally unmemorable goulash of paint-by-numbers metalcore, but even the good bits of Killswitch are entirely absent.  The drummer, "Salty" Brandon Saller, handles the clean vocals with this band, and I want to give them props for that because I simply find singing drummers to be a cool thing on a personal level, but his voice is god damned annoying.  "Annoying" is a shitty descriptor, but that's really the purest distillation of what he sounds like.  He utilizes the same amateur theater inflection that Killswitch's cleans tend to use, where they sound like they're aiming for something really grand but just end up sounding unbearably corny.  He sounds like he delivers every line with his eyes closed and his bottom lip curled like a crying baby, and it comes out sounding very forcefully goofy, like the deepest falsetto in history.  Varkatzas's screams somehow come out sounding worse.  You know how grunge singers had that weird inflection that made it sound like they always had a soft "r" noise permeating every syllable?  (REEEVERN FRLOOOWWWR)  Well this guy's screams do the same thing except with a "w" sound.  They're this completely monotone mid range scream with every vowel sound replaced with some indistinct "wuh" noise and it's unintentionally hilarious.  "Right Side of the Bed" has a quick line around the 1:20 mark that says "all the memories of", and it's delivered like "BWUH BUH BUH BWUH BWAZOWF" and it's absolutely kills me every time.  That's what my dad sounds like when making fun of the music I like.  Both vocalists seem to have trouble enunciating with any clarity, which seems like an odd thing for a death metal fan to point out but when the cleanly sung line "Have you ever cried so hard?" comes out sounding like "Will you have a pretzel horn?" it becomes a really funny problem.  It's like they both have enormous tongues.  Or they're Seth Green's brother in Rat Race.

I spent so much time on the vocals because that's really all there is to offer on this album, because if the instrumental part wasn't an afterthought, it definitely feels like one.  "Right Side of the Bed" has a standout riff in the beginning, but even I immediately recognized it as damn near plagiarism of In Flames's "The Hive".  I don't even fuckin' like In Flames and I still immediately thought I recognized that riff from a better song.  This is some of the most inoffensive cookie cutter metalcore I've heard, and I've done deep dives into Christian metalcore where the music is a distinct and intentional second behind the lyrics.  Even For Today's worst albums have more effort put into the music than The Curse does.  If they're going for emotional intensity, they fail to elicit any emotion beyond total boredom.  The vocals are so front-and-center and so rarely shut the fuck up for more than a few seconds at a whack that it's pretty clear what the intended focal point of the band is.  I can't intensely hate something that isn't there, ya know?  I'll give them some credit for precisely one song buried in the back half.  "My Sanity on the Funeral Pyre" sounds like they hired a completely different backing band, because while it isn't necessarily great or anything, there is so much more effort put into this one it's genuinely shocking.  The verses ride on this punishing chug riff while the bass does a whole bunch of dwiddly doodles before they come crashing into lockstep in the pre-chorus for a genuinely good galloping melodeath riff.  It took them eleven fucking tracks to prove it but there are actual musicians in this band as opposed to it being the project of two mediocre vocalists trying and failing to punch above their weight so hard that they're getting KO'd by Glass Joe.  

I have no ending to this review.  Atreyu is bad.

RATING: 14%

RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol. II: Killswitch Engage - The End of Heartache

The End of Fartache

 

I always namedrop Killswitch as the prototypical metalcore band by the definition that caught fire around this time in America, but in all honesty As I Lay Dying was always right there with them and I've always seen them as sister bands to each other.  I came around to AILD years ago, but KSE has no such love from me, almost entirely because I'm only familiar with with their 2013 album that nobody listened to and have a vague memory of them being one of the wimpier bands in the style when I was a teenager.  In giving The End of Heartache a full, good faith listen well over a decade after the fact, I think I lucked out with my assumption being more or less right on the money.  At least when compared to AILD, as they so often were back then, Killswitch is definitely the less threatening band by a pretty wide margin.

So when I say they're one of the earliest examples of metalcore to break through, I'm obviously not talking about the Converge style where manic hardcore got dashed against metal.  I'm talking about this very specific substyle with an identical name that spawned an inescapable scene in the early to mid aughts.  This style (and so by extension, this album) is basically just Swedish melodeath as popularized by In Flames (which I sometimes deconstruct into "Iron Maiden with growls") blended with a vaguely hardcore proclivity for big knuckle-breaking breakdowns and a more explicitly post-hardcore love of emotive lyrics about inner struggles and relationships delivered with sugary sweet vocals in the invariably cleanly sung chorus of every single song.  So what you get when you hit play here is a sequence of predictable songs that start with double bass and screaming over aggressive Slaughter of the Soul b-sides before transitioning into expressive cleans over a half-time melodic chorus.  Repeat once, do a big heavy breakdown, bring the chorus back with harsh vocals layering in the background.  Rinse and repeat twelve times for a guaranteed success.

From what I understand, The End of Heartache was a major moment for Killswitch Engage, since judging by what I've picked up in my research, this was a bit of a hard melodic turn for them.  This could well be due to the introduction of vocalist Howard "Bones" Jones.  According to people I asked who like this band, the original (and now current again) vocalist, Jesse "The Body" Leach, is a better screamer, while Jones is a better singer.  So in theory it was the correct move to pivot to a more melodic approach in order to play to his strength.  And I won't deny it, Jones has a fucking beautiful voice.  His screams are nothing to write home about but his cleans are these booming injections of tender mid-range smoothness into the music that I can't help but admire unironically.  "Smooth" really is the operative word here, because once he switches to his cleans he doesn't have an ounce of grit in him, but they work marvelously in the context of what the music is trying to do with these grand melodic choruses.

The issue is that he works with what the music is trying to do.  In practice, the actual instrumental component of this record is so uninteresting and dull that he winds up being a wonderful singer miscast in a really average metal band.  Going straight from Shadows Fall to Killswitch has shown a positively canyonesque gulf in riff writing ability.  The End of Heartache is just as formulaic as anything in the niche tended to be, but apart from the crazy intense intro of "When Darkness Falls" and an awesome straight-to-the-point riff about thirty seconds into "Wasted Sacrifice" they fail to squeak out something that's even accidentally exciting.  "Simple" is not a dirty word for me, but god damn half of this album feels like first draft riffs that sorta fit into whatever song they were working on at the time that they failed to workshop even a little bit.  This feels lazy because that's such a hard criticism to back up, but it's really the best I've got.  I imagine a scene where "Mad" Adam Dutkiewicz sits down in his bedroom with his guitar.  He's already done his warmup exercises and jammed through some classic tunes he likes, so now it's songwriting time.  He closes his eyes and says "Okay, let's just play a metal riff", so he opens his eyes and plays the very first generic melodeath-y pattern that pops into his head before proudly saying "Done!" and emailing Jones to let him know the eighth track is ready.  I know they're professionals so I'm sure they worked really hard on all of these songs but man that's the vibe I get and it's hard to elucidate further.  Listen to that first riff on "Rose of Sharyn" and tell me with a straight face that that wasn't the first god damned idea he had before laying it to tape.  Hell it even sounds remarkably similar to the first riff on "Breathe Life"!  Same tempo playing similar patterns with the only substantial difference being a few more trilling bits on the latter track.

Even though I'm 100% sure these aren't literal first drafts, that's really the approach that makes the album make the most sense to me.  Structures are reused and so many sections are similar to one another throughout the album, from the tempos to the drum beats to the interplay between the guitars in the most melodic sections, The End of Heartache sounds like three songwriting tricks being flogged to the point of tedium and that's really the overarching problem with the whole album.  I can dig simplicity and pop song structuring, not everything needs to showcase some sort of avant-garde wizardry, but this goes too far in the other direction and plays everything so safe that it's actively un-fun to listen to.  At the end of the day, I'm walking away from this experience feeling like I just listened to a royalty-free audio pack labeled "metal-1.midi" with an inexplicably good vocalist crooning over the top.  It's a weak final thought but it's a weak album and I don't have much to work with, capice?

RATING: 38%

RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol. I: Shadows Fall - The War Within

If you've been around here for a while, you may remember my aborted Preteen Wasteland series from a few years ago, where I planned to revisit the nu metal albums I loved as a tween with the added gimmick of my mom writing a paragraph for each review since we listened to this albums together all the time.  It petered out because that gimmick was a gamble that didn't pay off, since she's a much more busy person than I am and just never found the time to revisit all of these old albums her dumbass son liked twenty years ago (if you're curious, the only albums that held up for me were Wisconsin Death Trip and Iowa, and Linkin Park, despite not being very enjoyable, at least stood out for their vocalists being one of the only good singers and the only rapper who clearly actually rapped for a living in the entire genre).  The secret part of all that is that I had a sequel series also planned, and now three years later I'm finally gonna take a break from playing Dragon Quest to get started on it.

 

I mentioned that I grew out of nu metal because as I got older, I got more interested in classic 80s metal and started to reject new, modern movements out of hand.  Because of this, the entire "NWOAHM" scene completely passed me by as it was happening.  Metal fans at school would see my Metallica shirt and try to start a conversation, and I'd snottily dismiss them based on their Killswitch Engage shirt and stupid haircut.  I'm sorry, does your shit thrash?  Then I don't fuckin' care, Kyle.  So help me god if I hear one god damned breakdown or one lyric about being sad then I'm going to screech like King Diamond at you until you leave me the hell alone.  It's no surprise that the few friends I had were also lame nerds.  

But now that I'm in my thirties and much less needlessly aggressive in every interaction, I think it's time I took a walk down memory lane, back into the halls of my high school, and take a look at the alternate timeline where I actually gave Kyle the time of day and gave his bands a shot.  The criteria here is fairly broad.  I'm going to be looking at the bands that had a foothold in the mainstream between ~2003-2006 that were netting good slots at Ozzfest, getting rotation on WZZN, and basically contributing to the musical zeitgeist of my generation that I stubbornly refused to even listen to because they probably didn't sound enough like Overkill and I desperately wanted the approval of the Elder Metalheads online.  From the initial boom of metalcore facilitated by As I Lay Dying, to the easier listening alternative emo metalcore or whatever the fuck Bullet for My Valentine was, to the nebulous blend of melodeath, thrash, and groove metal that Lamb of God made cool.  I'm not going in order of chronological release date this time, I'm just gonna sit here and think of a half dozen or so bands and albums from this era that I snobbily dismissed and go look at them with fresh senses.  You with me?  Let's go!

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The Light that Blands
 

Shadows Fall apparently has a pretty storied history within this niche, being one of the earlier bands to form (way back in 1995) and pulling an In Flames by having "Land" Phil Labonte (the meathead dipshit from All That Remains) sing on their first album before landing their iconic vocalist in "Flyin'" Brian Fair, and also accomplishing the rare feat of keeping a stable lineup for a solid 15 years and releasing several influential albums in a row with the same group of dudes in the studio.  That's why I'm choosing to start this series with them as opposed to bigger bands that broke out earlier.  Shadows Fall just kinda passes the smell test a bit better in terms of being a statuesque institution in the scene almost entirely due to their stability and, if fans are to be believed, consistency.  We're going to be looking at 2004's The War Within purely because a quick skim of the tracklist reveals some names that I vaguely remember hearing on the radio, so I'm not starting completely blind.

Let me tell you, I feel like a door in some deeply buried temple in my mind unlocked when I heard the main riff of "What Drives the Weak" that starts around the eleven second mark.  That fuckin' octave-slide-to-gallop-chug-to-pinch-harmonic brought back so many memories.  Hearing that was like unlocking the overworld map in Zelda.  It turns out that not only do I remember that riff, I also remember every note and lyric to not only "What Drives the Weak", but also "Inspiration on Demand" and "The Light that Blinds", the three I passively heard on the radio as a teenager.  This might seem like personal fluff to pad out the review but really I think it speaks to how finely tuned Shadows Fall's songwriting is.  These hooks never left my brain after picking them up via audial osmosis a decade and a half earlier.  The aggression inherent in most metal is definitely there in the speedy double bass and harsh vocals, but these guys have a very keen ear for melody and hooks, absolutely nailing that nexus between simplicity and complexity by crafting catchy riffs and In Flames style melodies that are different enough to be instantly recognizable and simple enough to be easily remembered.  The abundance of squealing guitar solos keeps The War Within recognizably metallic in its theatricality and the equal abundance of simplistic chugs and breakdowns interspersed between the high tempo melodeath riffing keeps it recognizably emblematic of the time in which it was made.  This is As I Lay Dying for thrash kids, and I absolutely should've loved this as a teen.

The problem arises when you listen beyond those three singles, because Shadows Fall definitely suffers from the same problem Lamb of God frequently fell victim to.  The War Within has a few obvious highlights and then a bunch of filler.  They're excellent at crafting these memorable hooks, but they're very reliant on a small handful of tricks to achieve this effect, and it doesn't take long for the simplified pop song verse-chorus structure to reveal itself to be a very workmanlike project.  Apart from the closest thing the scene probably had to a power ballad in "Inspiration on Demand" and the sweet guitar lick that opens "The Light that Blinds", the remaining eight tracks are all more or less interchangeable.  "What Drives the Weak" is clearly the best one thanks to that tasty main riff, memorable chorus, bass licks in the pre-chorus, and soaring leads, but everything else sounds like previous drafts of that song before the screws were fully tightened.  I've listened to this like four or five times in preparation for this review and I still can't remember what "Act of Contrition" or "Ghosts of Past Failures" sounds like.  "The Power of I and I" really should stand out for the first thirty seconds being honest to god Cannibal Corpse worship, but it very quickly shifts gears back into that nebulous monogenre that took America by storm in the mid aughts.  

 

It really doesn't help that Fair is uh... more "recognizable" as a vocalist than he is "good".  That's not to say he's bad necessarily, but his gruff monotone quasi-scream is basically musical wallpaper and it gets to be distracting when you pay attention to it.  It sounds like Fair knows that you can avoid damage to your vocal chords by screaming more from your diaphragm than from your throat, but he never really nailed the technique in such a way that would allow him to sound as menacing as he's likely trying to sound.  As a result they're very breathy and clearly layered over themselves a few times throughout the whole album, so they come off more like talk-level yells with a volume boost.  That legitimate death metal influence does shine through occasionally with random deep roars, but they're depressingly uncommon.  Shadows Fall is very much a guitar band, all of their best elements revolve around the riffs and solos, so it's bizarre to me that the vocals often take center stage considering how mediocre they are compared to the rest of the band.  If my memory is correct, the guitarists are the ones who handle the clean vocals that invariably carry every chorus, and they're fine I guess, but it just sorta adds to the plug-and-play nature of the songwriting.  The individual elements are occasionally fantastic, but the old dichotomy of "harsh aggressive verses - clean melodic choruses" never breaks, and it gets old very quickly.

The instrumental element of the band is surprisingly great, but the vocals are an obvious weak link and the songwriting is very formulaic.  As a result, The War Within is basically a blur of faceless aggression with a handful of spikes in quality every three tracks or so.  As much as I'd love to hear more of those death metal roots poking through, I feel like leaning into them any more than they have would fundamentally change what the band was going for, so that feels like an unfair way to critique the album, especially when all the best parts are clearly rooted in American melodeath instead of orthodox death metal anyway.  The overall color of the album is "grey".  Any splashes of vibrance to be found are pretty neatly sequestered into the handful of great songs and the rest of the album feels like a tedious sidequest before getting back to the good songs.  I'm still gonna give it a positive score because god dammit I really like the three songs I highlighted early on and the rest of the album is fundamentally very similar to them, but on the whole it loses its lustre pretty quickly.  If nothing else, I feel like this is a great primer to this scene because everything that made it what it is is here to some extent, and I feel confident in saying that everything I check out from this point on will focus on one element found here more than the rest.

RATING: 66%

NEW AMERICAN GOSPEL: Lamb of God - Ashes of the Wake

III: Oak Fest Heehaws

I can remember the exact moment the curtain was peeled back on Lamb of God for me.  It was during the brief period I was in a real band when I was in high school, sometime around 2006.  We decided we should learn a cover or two in addition to writing originals just to kind of help us gel as players together, and we decided on Lamb of God's "Hourglass" among a few others.  We all went home to learn our respective parts, and at the next band practice we all announced pretty much in unison "Man, did anyone else not realize before how fucking boring that song is?"  Yeah it turns out that once you strip the drums away (which are always the most impressive part of any given Lamb of God track), the riffs themselves are just fucking dull as hell and completely mind numbing to play, and "Hourglass" is a great representative for such a phenomenon.  I think we all decided on that song initially because that riff about one minute into the song is fucking devastating, but after that glorious twenty seconds, the guitars and bass basically just play straight eighth notes at one tempo for the next three solid minutes and not a single one of us ever wanted to play it again.

Now, obviously I still liked Lamb of God after this moment (as you'll see as the series continues), but it really does highlight one of the biggest problems with Ashes of the Wake.  While it may be their most popular album by a pretty huge margin and is considered a high watermark for the scene, it is boring as shit once you pay attention medium-hard.  In fact this is the one I'm probably most dreading writing about simply because I fucking hate listening to it.

The band was already well popular by this point, but this really sees the band on autopilot, which might sound odd considering it's their most iconic album and features their most popular song, but it's true.  That inspired ferocity of New American Gospel is pretty much entirely gone at this point, replaced with a very calculated sense of obligation.  Almost all of these riffs sound focus tested to an extreme degree.  Whenever it sounds like they're about to really break out into some sort of unhinged aggression, it steps back and starts plodding with super pedestrian groove riffs.  "The Faded Line" is a great example of this, with that neat zippy guitar line right before the chorus barges in and starts stinking up the joint with an uninspired In Flames knockoff riff.  The title track does this as well, with that pure thrash riff that starts up about a minute into the song (what is up with this album and the good riffs starting at the one minute mark and never showing up again?) is absolutely fucking explosive but finds itself bookended by phoned-in nonsense and a really piddly atmospheric section.  "Ashes of the Wake" has potential to be the best song in general since it's loaded with solos (something the band tends to eschew) and contains the best riff on the album, but as it stands its really bloated and faffs about with no real direction far too often, especially in the slower middle section.

It's hard to really describe the problems with the album outside of just calling it phoned-in or half-assed, because that's really all it is.  It's the exact same type of riff structure and songwriting flow that made the good songs on As the Palaces Burn work so well, but apart from a few scattered tracks they all just sound like they were written in an afternoon in a quick attempt to cash in on the success of the previous album (it did come out a mere 15 months later, and it's not like they didn't tour in support of that previous album).  I mean holy shit listen to "Omerta", it's a five minute track that feels like fifteen because it's just mid paced plodding that never gets to the god damned point.  It's also one of the oddly several tracks with spoken word segments, which always feel like pointless add-ons that Randy couldn't be bothered to growl properly.  The opening of "Omerta" is the most egregious since it's completely a capella and even structures the words themselves in such a way that they rob themselves of dramatic tension.  That's such a weird thing to call out, but there's a reason he flips the "If I live, I will kill you, if I die, you are forgiven" part when they play this song live.

The good songs are easy to point out, because there's only really two of them.  I'll give a little bit of credit to "Blood of the Scribe" for having a good amount of adrenaline in it for a few moments, but it mostly falls into the same trap as "Hourglass" where it starts off way better than it ends (the exact opposite problem of what they suffered on the previous album), but it's really not a contest when it comes to what the best songs are.  "Break You" and "Laid to Rest" absolutely tear the rest of this album to shreds, without fucking question.  The former sounds like a lost session from As the Palaces Burn with how frenetic it is, and it's such a welcome feature for pretty much every aspect to shift as often as it does since the rest of the album is so pedestrian and samey.  The tempo is constantly fluctuating up to some of the album's highest speeds, the riffs are positively thrashy at times (this isn't usually their strength, but on this album almost all of the best riffs sound like lost thrash riffs) and Randy utilizes his higher register much more often on this one than any other track.

But really, I'm dancing around the elephant in the room here.  "Laid to Rest" is the band's signature song, the one that found itself on Guitar Hero II, the one they are guaranteed to play at every single show (I saw them like eight times between 2006-2010 and they opened with it every damn time), and holy shit did it earn that distinction.  You'd think Ashes of the Wake was going to be this massive fucking statement based on how monstrously huge the opening track is, because god damn is "Laid to Rest" a fucking statement.  Every single riff is devastating, the song is built in such a way that it just keeps pummeling you over and over again, the chorus is gorgeously destructive, even the "SEE WHO GIVES A FUCK" part is so corny that it loops around to being endearing.  Even the breakdown fucking kills, which is impressive because this album is so loaded with lazy-ass open-string chug breakdowns that feel thrown in as an obligation.  And when it ends and the chorus riff comes charging back in underneath a fifteen second scream?  Just god damn I break my oath to the Volcel Police every time.  The whole song is fucking excellent and is pretty much the anthem for this nebulous "New Wave of American Heavy Metal" that was sweeping the nation at the time.  This is the song that every God Forbid and Shadows Fall wished they had written.

Again, there's really no place to put this, but it's worth mentioning that they definitely got the production right on this one.  Instead of the mix being a muddy slush of excess gain that sounds like it was recorded on a cell phone, Ashes of the Wake is exactly as tight and heavy as the songs themselves.  As far as I'm concerned this album has two true claims to fame despite all of the lazy bullshit on it: "Laid to Rest" is an awesome song and at least they got the production right this time.  I'm never going to bring up the production again because every single album from here on out sounds exactly like this one.

And yet, Ashes of the Wake drops the ball super quickly afterwards because it's almost nothing but lameass filler from the second track until the end.  I didn't even point out how much "Now You've Got Something to Die For" sucks, but it really needs to be mentioned that it truly does suck.  What a lazy and uninspired excuse for a crowd singalong.  The day they retire it from the setlist is the day I'll consider paying money to see them live again.  The few scattered moments of excellence that pop up in "Blood of the Scribe" and the title track plus the lone other good-the-whole-time track, "Break You", just can't overcome the lazy weakness of the rest of the album.  Lamb of God cemented their legacy on this album, but it's a shame because god damn this is their first truly bad one.


RATING: 37%

NEW AMERICAN GOSPEL: Lamb of God - As the Palaces Burn

II: Unescapable Trash

Before I say anything else, can I just say that "Ruin", despite being one of the band's better songs, is a really shitty opening track?  Man it just doesn't give off the feeling of an opening track.  Sure it sets the tone for the album, but it starts off with its weakest riff, neither easing the listener into the experience nor smashing them in the face at full force.  It just immediately smacks you with a really lazy and mediocre riff and that's just a terrible way to start things off, even if the song gets continually better as it goes, featuring one of their extremely rare (at the time) guitar solos and one of the fastest breakdowns in the genre.  And hey, the "chorus" section is startlingly catchy as well.  Keep an eye out for that part and specifically the line "This is the resolution / The end of all progress".  Put a pin in those nine words, they're going to be very important later.

Anyway, As the Palaces Burn is Lamb of God's second album, and is very clearly the album where they found their niche.  I love New American Gospel, but I'd never pinpoint it as a starting point for somebody who wants to understand what the band is all about.  Their debut is a mess of sloppy noise that accidentally coalesced into a devastating monument to modern brutality, but it was As the Palaces Burn where everything truly came into form.  This is the album where the Pantera-isms came to the forefront, where their own distinctive riffing style blossomed, where the songwriting started becoming more "normal" and less of a winding stream of consciousness, where Randy's vocals took on that deeper register they're most known for, it all truly started here.  What makes this special as opposed to "just another Lamb of God album" isn't necessarily that it all started here, it's that it's just unrefined enough to still sound like a young band coming into their own.  There's a sort of charm to that.

I struggle to explain exactly what I mean when I mention their distinctive riffing style, simply because I'm not a guitar player and I don't understand music theory beyond the most basic idea of what an accidental is, but there's a very specific key or scale that they seem to always use.  It's very prevalent in the opening riff to "11th Hour".  In fact, almost the entire remainder of their career is foreshadowed in "11th Hour".  Anybody who understands what the fuck a diminished phyrgian locrian hullabaloobian scale means, please tell me what the fuck it is that Lamb of God is always playing in.  They seem to have a very specific scale that is instantly recognizable but I lack the technical term for it and it's been driving me crazy for decades.

One of the most notable flaws of the band that truly begins here, that will (spoilers) absolutely become their achilles heel in the future, is that they very quickly morphed into a "hit single" type band.  That manic consistency of the debut is wholly gone here.  I don't know exactly how calculated it is, but from here on out it becomes very clear that each album will have two or three excellent standouts and then a bunch of filler.  As the Palaces Burn tends to fare a bit better than some of their future works, but there's no denying that half of this album is a total bore, and those five meaningless tracks are all right in a row.  "Ruin" opens the album on something of a whimper but it picks up a hell of a lot of kinetic energy, establishes their talent for hooks, and culminates with an absolutely devastating breakdown that seems to fly past at 200+bpm.  It's followed up by the title track and "Purified", two of their most underappreciated songs.  The former is a total barnburner, wasting zero time with intros or buildup and opens with a hockey stick to the teeth, and "Purified" stands as their thrashiest song without a doubt (it even has a guest solo courtesy of Chris Poland).  That verse riff still decimates me, and the intensity is maintained throughout.  "11th Hour" is the worst of the good songs, but it's still solid enough.  It's very much in line with what The Haunted was doing at the time, with a very meaty dose of Pantera-esque groove.  Chris keeps the intensity high with his frantic drumming, but this is the track that knocks the tempo down a few pegs from the blistering triad at the start and it never really recovers.  This is clearly meant to be a more atmospheric and melodic take on that pissed off early 2000s metalcore that they championed on the first few tracks, and while it never goes into the overtly theatrical shit that Killswitch Engage did, they're obviously doing something very different here.  The track is saved from the weak chorus with the dumb *dweeuhnuh DWEAOWHNUH* guitar line by the back half which brings back some of that cataclsymic heaviness showcased in the back half of "Ruin".

Then the next five tracks happen.  From "For Your Malice" to "Blood Junkie", you just get "11th Hour" five more times and it gets real tiring real fast.  I've been a fan of this album for like fifteen years and I still can't differentiate any of those songs between each other.  There's a reason the only tracks that get trotted out live are the first handful and the closer, because this entire middle stretch is just filler in its most cynical form.  I can only imagine that the guys wrote "11th Hour" first and then decided that they really liked it, probably got a good reaction when they played it to friends or at shows before the album was done or something, and just figured it'd be safe to keep doing that song forever.  Even the fast moments on "Boot Scraper" and such feel mid paced and sluggish, not even Adler's spastic drumming can keep them interesting as a whole (instead he's the only interesting component of them).  I can say this is probably the first time the lyrics themselves are worth noting though.  I haven't really brought them up before because they're kinda inconsequential and just an excuse for Randy to make crazy mouth sounds since he still wasn't really enunciating his words at this point, but in a desperate search to find anything cool about this stretch of boredom I did discover that "In Defense of Our Good Name" contains some weirdly icky shit about southern pride and how slavery was bad but we should probably stop holding it against the people who for some odd reason can't seem to let go of the Confederacy.  Nah, I know you guys are from Virginia and all, but don't be proud of that particular part of your heritage.  Keep singing about how humanity is shit and the church is a lie, leave the socially conscious lyrics elsewhere.  You really suck at picking your targets apparently.

I did a quasi-track by track thing up there because it's really worth noting how quickly the album dips after the fourth track, but it's not a total split.  I mentioned the closer up there for good reason.  "Vigil" is, potentially, their best song throughout their discography.  They (probably not coincidentally) closed their first two albums with their slowest tracks, showcasing riffs that landed on some middle ground between Sabbath and Obituary, and of the tracks that take this approach, "Vigil" is clearly the better one.  The acoustic intro is a new thing for them, and it's capable of tearing the roof off any establishment once that monstrous doom riff (and yeah, it's a legitimately punishing doom riff instead of simply slower metalcore like they often are in the slower sections) smashes in.  I'm sure you've probably noticed that I've been praising "the back half" of songs pretty often, and that's no accident.  At this point in time, Lamb of God was very good at picking up steam as they went, with each new riff building upon a previous one until the resulting katamari steamrolled the listener with alarming lethality.  "Vigil" becomes positively fucking feral in final two minutes, throwing back to the total chaos of New American Gospel.

There really wasn't a good place to put this other than as a tacked on addendum at the end here, but As the Palaces Burn has another glaring flaw apart from the five track stretch of mediocrity, and that's that the production is bafflingly terrible.  Between this and Metallica, 2003 really must've just been the year of bewilderingly bad production jobs from people that absolutely should've known better.  This was produced by Devin Townsend of all people, somebody who clearly knows how to make metal sound good, but for whatever reason, either at his behest or the band's, As the Palaces Burn sounds like a low quality secondhand dub.  I can only assume what they were going for here was a sound that could be described as "raw", but man there's a really clear difference between the raw sound on New American Gospel where it was coupled with raw and unsifted songs, and the much more calculated and finely tuned riffwork here being completely butchered by talented people trying to make it sound shitty on purpose.  This is one of the few modern metal albums where I really think it's worthwhile to just skip the original product and get the remastered version they released for the 10th anniversary, it's at least a thousand times better considering the tightness of the songs themselves.

At the end of the day, As the Palaces Burn is a mixed bag.  It has some bona fide scorchers with tracks like "Purified" and "Ruin" and even some genuine outside-the-box creativity for the band in "Vigil".  But the atrocious mix and at least five and a half songs of indisputable filler on a ten track album makes it a bit of a hard sell.  It still ends with a positive score because the good tracks are definitely worth listening to (the good half of the album are all live staples for a reason) and it's noteworthy for being the album where Lamb of God truly started forging their own identity in the burgeoning metalcore scene, but I'd be lying through my teeth if I said it wasn't massively flawed.


RATING: 61%

NEW AMERICAN GOSPEL: Lamb of God - New American Gospel

I: Leering Spacewoman

I have something of a proclivity for review series, y'all know that.  I've run through quite a few and have even started a few that I haven't bothered to finish across like ten years.  Usually when I do a discography-focused one, it's because I have some sort of intimate connection with the band, and Lamb of God is no exception, though it's for slightly different reasons than you may expect.  Just like with Mastodon, I was a really big fan in high school, but if anybody has been able to pick up/remember my age, I was in high school during the boom of Myspace bands and the eventual domination metalcore and deathcore in the American metal scene.

And I hated all of it.

I originally had like three more paragraphs detailing my journey to discovering that being a teenage elitist that only liked classic bands and instantly despised anything that had harsh vocals or lacked solos was stupid and arbitrarily restrictive, but I realized that it dragged a lot and wasn't really important in the end.  Just know that Lamb of God was the band to break that prejudice for me.  For many people my age, they were their first "extreme" band.  I wouldn't go quite that far for me since I did already like Slayer and Kreator's work in the 80s, but they were probably the first distinctly "modern" band that I really liked, and certainly the first in that loose collection of metalcore-tinged bands that was being called the New Wave of American Heavy Metal at the time.  And now, in 2019, with Chris Adler formally resigning from the band and breaking their 20 year streak of stability (two decades with the original lineup is one hell of a feat), I think it's high time to take a look back and see how they've held up, and to simply chronicle their journey throughout their time in the limelight.

And no, I'm not starting with Burn the Priest because I've only listened to the album released under that name like twice in my life.  Maybe I'll make it a bonus chapter or something.


Lamb of God first broke onto the scene in 2000 with this, New American Gospel, an arguably ambitious title because whether they knew it or not, they were right on the cusp of ushering in an entirely new era of heavy music for the country.  Despite that, New American Gospel is really unique in their discography because, unless this is your first exposure to the band, this is clearly very different from the sound they'd become known for in the near future.  In essence, this album pulls double duty being both the first Lamb of God album and effectively the second Burn the Priest album.

At this point in time, Lamb of God was still a very chaotic band.  That's not to say this is really spazzy and technical, because it's not, but this is by far the most anarchic and least structured album of their career.  At almost no point does the band sound like they really know what they're doing, and frankly that's the entire appeal to me.  This is the sound of a relatively young band (though everybody barring Willie Adler, the "baby" of the band being a few years younger than the rest, were all in their late 20s at the time) just flying by the seat of their pants and figuring shit out as they went.  There are obviously moments of well crafted songwriting like the iconic buildup in "Black Label" or the intro of "The Subtle Arts of Murder and Persuasion", but on tracks like "A Warning", "In the Absence of the Sacred", and especially "Confessional" they sound absolutely fucking unhinged.  There is a shitload of hardcore influence on here, and I don't mean the same kind of hardcore influence that many of their contemporaries in the As I Lay Dying or Killswitch Engage camps were showcasing.  This is less about calculated dropped-string open chugs and more about sheer chaotic noise.  It would be misleading to say that specific type of chuggy breakdown never appears here, it's pretty common actually, but the songs aren't built around them.  Instead everything feels like it happens by accident.  This is a very organic album that drowns itself in agony and frustration, with the drums lashing out in violent tantrums at seemingly random times underneath discordant and damn near unlistenable wailing riffs.

That might sound like I'm knocking the album, but I'm really not.  This is going to be an insane comparison, but bear with me: I view New American Gospel similarly to how I view Ulver's Nattens Madrigal.  I know they're very different albums, but they have a common thread between them in that they're nigh unlistenable masterpieces.  This album is, objectively speaking, a fucking mess.  It's a structureless mishmash of disconnected riffs and drums that are far more technical than any of the other instruments, which seem content to take quasi Pantera-esque groove and inject them with massive doses of speed and dissonance.  The typical verse-chorus structure is nowhere to be found here, with each song instead ebbing and flowing with its own self contained energy.  This is said with the benefit of hindsight, but considering where the band would go from here, this became an excellent monument to weirdness within their discography pretty quickly.  This is a very loose album, for sure.  The one thing holding everything together is Chris Adler's drum performance, which is comparatively extremely tight and paradoxically technical.  He throws in little triplet fills all over the place and manages to tie the room together despite being one of the most chaotic elements of the band in a vacuum.  I'm sure if you could hear isolated drum tracks somehow, it'd be almost impossible to tell which track you're listening to, he's all over the god damned place.

But really, there's an elephant in the room here, and it's time to address it.  Randy Blythe's vocals on this are wildly different from what he'd rise to prominence with... and they're actually the best part of the album.  Whereas every album after this he'd feature a very deep roar/shout (more in line with his almost hilariously bassy speaking voice, seriously he talks like fucking Xerxes in 300) on the debut here he features a piercing shriek almost exclusively.  Even when he goes deep, he sounds like he's wailing and/or vomiting.  It's almost black metal-esque in approach, though it's probably more accurate to compare it to the more emotionally brutal hardcore bands of the 90s.  He sounds like a mix of a choking leopard and Chewbacca trying to lose weight for the prom.  This vocal performance is really what I think makes New American Gospel so special, because it recontextualizes all of the nasty riffage into something positively ugly.  Despite the nearly endless praise I've given this album, it's honestly really hard to listen to, and Randy is a big reason why.  Everything is so painful and raw, like he's tearing his own heart out and bleeding all over the floor with each line.  It's well known that he was a bona fide semi-functioning alcoholic for most of the band's early era, and it's also well known that he was absolutely fucking hammered when recording this album.  From what I understand, he recorded all of his vocal tracks in one day, drunk off his gourd, with no breaks.  "Black Label" is famous for having only four real words followed by a bunch of random scat noises that they tried to fit lyrics to afterwards.  "Letter to the Unborn" is also pretty infamous for the lyrics being unknown apart from fan guesses thanks to the band refusing to publish them since they were so personal (though it's known that it's about Randy and his wife at the time suffering a miscarriage).  It adds so much to that aforementioned raw ugliness of the record, Randy being pissed to his eyes during recording and just being super broken and vulnerable at the time.  You don't get that sort of open passion every day, and they never managed to recreate it.

Overall, despite being a tough listen featuring ten tracks of seemingly random screeching noises, I'd actually almost be willing to lay my chips down as this being my favorite Lamb of God album based solely on its consistency.  There are no real dips in quality here apart from maaaaybe "Pariah" and "The Black Dahlia" being kinda inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, though the former has an absolutely blistering climax.  The groove element that would soon become their bread and butter is here, but it's somewhat hidden underneath layers and layers of screaming madness.  "Black Label" has it in spades and "O.D.H.G.A.B.F.E" is presented as an almost Sabbathy dirge of doom riffs, but upon further examination it's just slower groove riffs.  Either way, New American Gospel is the biggest black sheep in their discography, in part because it's stylistically closer to their Burn the Priest era than anything else, and ergo is indisputably their most intense record, replete with thrashy discordant hardcore and arguably grindcore influenced blasts of ferocity.  It's admittedly a hard listen, with an aversion to catchiness and a severely undercooked production underneath a wailing vocal performance.  Honestly though?  I wouldn't change a single thing about this album.  It's an accidental masterpiece, pure lightning in a bottle that they never came close to recapturing.



RATING: 88%

For I am King - I

I forgot to think of a title

I'm gonna be real with you all, I only stumbled across this because I'm a masochist who occasionally trawls the "metal" section of Spotify to see what's hip with the kids these days (spoiler alert, it's all still nu metal, djent, and metalcore; all the "false metal" trends have long surpassed "trend" status and are here to stay, well out of our view as snobby purists), and this was just the first new release listed from a band that was listed on MA.  Unsurprisingly, they're metalcore.  And unsurprisingly, they're exceedingly mediocre.

I've been vocal enough over the years about how I break from many of my contemporaries in that I don't loathe metalcore on principle.  I think there's plenty of potential for the modern style to be great if a band goes full out one way or another with it.  The problem is that many bands just... don't.  They stick to a template of inoffensive melodeath with clean choruses and breakdowns every once in a while and that's the beginning and end of the creativity.  That's where For I am King stands, right smack in the middle of the bell curve with seemingly millions of other bands that sound exactly the same as them.

That's not to say that I is a terrible album or anything, there are certainly things about it that I like.  Alma's dedication to purely harsh vocals is nice and helps keep the aggression high without the melodic moments ever taking center stage.  You could argue that this keeps the album pretty one-dimensional, and you wouldn't exactly be wrong, but it does help the album avoid the pitfall of giving lame cliche hooks center stage and souring the aggressive parts.  As much as I like As I Lay Dying, there's no denying that the clean choruses often sound wimpy as shit and take away from the surprising adrenaline of the verses.  There are boatloads of melodic guitar lines that flitter away in the background that try to help the songs soar above the meaty riffs underneath, but they never really succeed in providing that epic sound I'm sure they're going for.  The breakdowns are pretty consistently great though, smashing through with vigor and providing a really strong counterpoint to the A Plea for Purging/Phineas style melodic noodling that permeates most of the runtime.  Credit where credit is due, these dudes can bring the house down when they focus on it.

The problem is that they just... don't most of the time.  The components are there to put the aggression center stage but they spend most of I with one foot in the pool, never truly diving in to any one element that they could focus on.  As a result you get decent melodeath with decent melody and good breakdowns that come far too infrequently to really rise above and become a true highlight.  It's very thin and spread across the board, and unfortunately that's how most metalcore winds up sounding.  I hate that I have to start every metalcore review with a caveat that "it's not that bad guys!" before just proving how watered down and mediocre snobs like me always say it is anyway.  There's really nothing to stick here, and that's a shame because I feel like this could be excellent, but I also feel like there's really nothing to point to that could potentially be a highlight if it was approached differently.  Maybe the breakdowns, but that's not really something I'd want to hear either.  I guess For I am King is destined to be yet another face in the crowd.  Sorry y'all.


RATING: 51%

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