Forging a Future Self

While not a codified rule, there is definitely a tendency among younger bands to try to make a name for themselves by throwing every single trick they know into their first studio outing. This tends to be a double-edged sword as while it will tend to work well in getting attention, if done to the point of abandoning any sense of coherence, it can lose an audience about as quickly as it finds one. As a style, deathcore has a tendency of being quite prone to this eventuality, given that in addition to being a hybrid of several established styles in itself, it has a fairly strong rooting in progressive metal and tends to play with the arrangement more than a standard mishmash of extreme styles. After The Burial pegged themselves as being on the more progressive side of the deathcore coin, all but to the point of becoming a sort of artsy, avant-garde take on the concept, and their first foray into LP territory Forging A Future Self throws just about everything at the listener in a mere half hour's time.

To be fair, the contents that this jumbled opus carries has several moments of untainted luster, not to mention a keen eye towards the sort of innovative songwriting that progressive minded metal heads of various kinds can appreciate. Curiously enough, their moment of absolute brilliance is the two-minute instrumental introduction "Pi (The Mercury God Of Infinity)", which consists of a noodling acoustic intro right out of an early 19th century classical concert, followed by a grooving drone of a breakdown section that maps out the numbers of the mathematical constant rhythmically well into double-digit decimal territory. The amount of concentration it would take to pull something like that off live is quite staggering, though just the sort of quirkiness that any Dream Theater or Rush fan could appreciate, especially given that the trademark mishmash of hardcore and death metal vocals are absent from the equation.

As the actual meat and potatoes of this album unfolds, it becomes clear that in spite of some extremely well-conceived ideas, that the band overthought things here. Intermittent fragments of ideas typical to the likes of As I Lay Dying and All That Remains (aka melodeath tinged metalcore riffs) trade spots with meandering breakdown sections reminiscent of Meshuggah and The Faceless and the occasional outright nod to groovy droning courtesy of early Machine Head. There are even a couple points where things get mixed up between the sort of rapid fire noodling heard on turn of the millennium Dream Theater and slow-trudging heaviness with squealing pinch harmonics that could pass for slam death. None of these elements in and of themselves are poorly executed, but they are thrown together in a fashion comparable to a modern artist throwing buckets of paint at a giant canvass, with little accounting for transition.

Be all this as it may, there are some clear examples of cohesion that definitely point to this band's better regarded sophomore effort Rareform, and even the weaker songs are not without moments of strength. The album's title song "Forging A Future Self" is the clearest example of the few songs where things don't get too convoluted, and things tend a bit towards a purely metalcore approach with a fairly melodic and thrashing gloss, though it does get a bit mathematical during the one djenty breakdown about halfway through and the vocals are a tad schizophrenic. Overall this is a decent album if taken in small doses, but it can be a bit of a struggle to get through the whole thing in a single sitting given all the disjointed elements involved. It stands as a sort of flawed rough draft of what would later become a polished and more innovative take on deathcore compared to some of the other names that were on the bandwagon in the mid-2000s.