Going forward, you’ll have to forgive me some cheesiness - deep down, all metal is a little silly, and it’s hard not to give in every so often - but I’m going to let Arrow’s mission statement for the American Horror Project reiterate some points for me, with adjusted terminology:
Everyone knows the classic metalcore bands: Botch, Converge, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Every Time I Die, and Killswitch Engage, to name but a few. But we want to tell you a different story – a story of the unsung musicians of American metalcore… Whether it’s a band that has languished in obscurity, or an album that’s at risk of being lost due to a lack of physical copies/working download links, American Metalcore Project is here to ensure that these unique slices of the American metal scene are brought back into the public consciousness….Newly contextualised, with American Metalcore Project we can re-evaluate an alternative history of American metal and metallic hardcore heritage. Although the abovementioned bands are listed in alphabetical order for convenience’s sake, it’s interesting that they also wind up organizing roughly by their importance to American metalcore. It’s impossible to argue the far-reaching effects of We Are The Romans, Jane Doe, Calculating Infinity, Hot Damn!, and The End of Heartache on each major epoch of metalcore, which is generally held to have come in three “waves,” like black metal: the pioneers, the refiners, and the rest. The term metalcore itself gives away its parentage. Initially a fusion of thrash and hardcore punk, prototypical metallic hardcore bands like Earth Crisis, Starkweather, and Rorschach first found success in fast tempos, slow breakdowns, and shouted vocals before Coalesce and Shai Hulud upped the metal and doubled down on their (sometimes opposing?) messages of brotherhood and community, misanthropy and individualism. Metalcore didn’t come into its own until the mid-to-late nineties, when it experienced its first and largest renaissance. High-speed tempos and breakdowns remain staples of the subgenre, but the template has taken on some nuances: melodic death metal mostly replaced thrash as a base around the turn of the century, and black metal, death metal, and grind have all gotten their fingers into the metalcore pie, gradually eliminating the punk influence. Nonetheless, Botch, Converge, and The Dillinger Escape Plan persist as a damn-near Holy Trinity in the church of metalcore (with Coalesce sometimes included, although their situation is analogous to Testament’s in the so-called Big Four of thrash). Their output from 1999-2001 is its foundation, and just about any great metalcore band can trace their lineage back to what these acts were doing at the time. Hundreds of bands still ape the mathy plod of We Are The Romans. The broken-heart-on-tattered-sleeve sincerity of Jane Doe still goes unequaled. The batshit technical skill and madman compositions of Calculating Infinity are the gold standard. These are unassailable classics. Then Hot Damn! swaggered onto the scene and changed it, almost on the spot, with its southern-fried New York groove and ferocious sarcasm, and The End of Heartache broke metalcore into the mainstream with acoustic guitars, accessible melodies, and a production style that defined the “sound” of the 00’s and beyond. And so: metalcore as we know it. This is all orthodox, the history of metalcore as it happened, with each major shift accounted for. The shadows of these classics loom so large over it all that it simply wouldn’t make sense to not acknowledge them, even if our goal is, in some ways, to do just that. But we're not here to split so many hairs. What we want to look at, and more importantly to uncover, is an alternate history of American metalcore, one that unfurls in the shadows of the greats. We can make arguments for Poison the Well’s The Opposite of December, for Cave In’s Until Your Heart Stops, Shai Hulud’s Hearts Once Nourished With Hope and Compassion, maybe for Overcast’s Reborn to Kill, Integrity’s For Those Who Fear Tomorrow, and possibly, if we truly wish to do away with metal’s elitist habits, Norma Jean and Underoath. It is absolutely true that each of these bands and albums added something to the metalcore pot, but rest assured, each were left off for good reason. We’ll get to that. Now that we’ve acknowledged the darkness in which we’ll be working, it’s time to name our new classics.
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Brian LesmesWherein Brian hilariously overanalyzes a subgenre of metal! Archives
May 2018
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