It Dies Today - Forever Scorned (2002)Forever Scorned is heavy. That’s about all there is to it, but “heavy” can be so much in the right hands. At least for one record, It Dies Today had the touch. They never rediscovered what inspired metalcore grenades like “Sentiments of You” and “Bloodstained Bed Sheet Burden,” but that’s what makes Forever Scorned so worth revisiting when The Caitiff Choir doesn’t cut it. Sometimes you just need to hear the way “Sentiments of You” builds up to that first, clobbering riff and the way Nick Brooks seems to really mean it when he says he’s lost his head over a breakdown that sounds like it’s taken heads before. Is that hyperbolic? I suppose, but that’s par for the course for an album entrenched in the sounds and moods of early 00’s metalcore. Every song on Forever Scorned is about a failed romantic endeavor, which, for some reason, this style of music utilized as a free pass to go as bleak as musically possible. Forever Scorned weds the trudging riffs of the darkest American hardcore to the guitar heroics of Swedish melodeath, and juxtaposes death growls, grimy shrieks, and heartfelt emo singing over this foundation. The subject of the cover is a scarecrow and a fence in some bombed-out field, rendered in smudgy browns; the song titles are preposterous, “The Requiem for Broken Hearts” and “A Romance By the Wings of Icarus” on a tracklist next to the absurdly ominous “Bloodstained Bed Sheet Burden” and the milquetoast “Bridges Left Burning.” The words “Forever Scorned” rest in the bottom right corner in ornate cursive, while the stark Times New Roman of the band’s moniker hovers in the upper left. What? I’m not ragging on It Dies Today. Let’s reiterate: Forever Scorned is heavy. That blend of hardcore and Swedish melodeath is better executed here than on The Caitiff Choir, and feels just as uniquely American as Alive Or Just Breathing, if not a bit more. It achieves a sort of grace in its clumsiness, illustrated best on “The Requiem For Broken Hearts,” which is almost beat-for-beat a melodic death metal song until that teeth-gnashing breakdown. It moves from aggressive to mournful and back within the first two minutes, teasing breakdown riffs that masterfully erode the song’s Swedishness away before returning to those sensibilities in full-force, but only for a moment. At 3:22, It Dies Today drop the hammer, and then, as if by way of apology, spend the rest of the song doting on Brooks’s off-key wails and these deeply silly lyrics: “Will you hold this close to your heart forever and always / or will you bathe in my blood forever and always?” The production on Forever Scorned is flawed but not unlistenable, and pretty good for a little metalcore band out of Buffalo, New York, a city no other notable metalcore bands call home. Its muddiness is actually a boon, especially to “Bloodstained Bed Sheet Burden,” which is unquestionably the heaviest and hardest-hitting song on the record. Brooks does not enunciate well, but this also works to the record’s benefit as it makes his growls and screams sound that much more guttural and monstrous (although I confess that I’m still not sure whether that growl at 4:21 is actually him; digital tampering; an uncredited guest; or a sample). The good lines comes through with greater power, and the bad ones are only slightly more intelligible when he sings, so how are you going to tell? The song is an undertow of panic chords, bludgeoning chugs, and feedback, strongly resembling--and maybe predicting--the downtempo movement. Metalcore was derided as music for meatheads more interested in physical assault than musicianship, and the popularity of breakdowns and slow hardcore riffs was regularly singled out as proof. Theoretically, downtempo is just an extension of that mindset, whether it was ever a real thing or not--a twisted little branch on the metalcore tree nourished by overwrought emotion and on a quest for the most ludicrously slow breakdowns possible. Maybe metalcore is to blame for it and for whatever downtempo leads to (notempo? Yikes), but with the clarity of hindsight, we can probably all agree that It Dies Today had the chops, and even the songwriting, to back up their ventures into “ludicrously slow,” proving they could get themselves mistaken for a true-blue Swedish melodeath band better than their peers. That’s all it was really about, back in the day--and by that measure, It Dies Today were an unqualified success.
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