Proprioception

Nowadays, metalheads don't seem to spend nearly as much time hating on deathcore. When I was first seriously getting into metal about a decade ago, it was the polarizing, hot button debate. If you weren't an active fan of the genre, you were likely to sneer at its very mention. The worst part? it was omnipresent. All the big metal labels seemed to be pushing it hard and new bands were being formed every ten minutes. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but it just kind of...went away. Chalk it up to a composite of factors: bands like The Faceless, BTBAM, The Contortionist and whatnot started going in proggier directions, sending the genre into splinters, for one. Djent started taking over, too, which only fueled the prog fire, and death metal influence slowly starting bleeding out of deathcore bands. Also, it seems like anybody who was just looking for massive thug breakdowns jumped ship to Nails et al. a long time ago. Put it all together and deathcore's plateau and slow decline in popularity seemed inevitable given its sudden explosion.

I realized a while ago I don't exactly spend that much time reviewing deathcore even though I tend to indirectly mention it a lot in reviews. And Hell Followed With seems as good of a place to start as any, because everything about Proprioception is a product of its time. This is a deathcore album straight outta 2010, let me tell you that much. I'm confident I would have been able to guess that accurately had I gone into this completely blind. Anybody with a basic working knowledge of what deathcore is could, really. This album sounds typical of the genre, but at the same time you can still hear the band struggling to find a new direction (much like deathcore was in 2010). There are djenty rhythms interspersed throughout, but the genre wasn't quite at full force yet so the off-timed chugging hangs there like a mutated appendage of sorts. Unable to fully detach itself from the sound typified by bands like Carnifex and Job For a Cowboy, Proprioception falls back on the usual amalgamation of Black Dahlia Murder riffs interspersed with way too many breakdowns that go on for way too long. When they're playing the faster melodeathcore stuff it's not bad at all, I like Nocturnal and all, but the patchwork songwriting that was all-too-common in C-grade deathcore has unfortunately infected this album in spades. The most egregious example of this is on "In Vastness I Transfigure". The song is generally a slower, more straightforward ballad-type deal, so it basically sounds like a giant breakdown right off the bat, but for the first couple of minutes it's not done poorly or anything. Then, at just a bit past the 2:20 mark, they drop an even slower chuggy thing with almost no introduction. It doesn't matter that the entire song was written to be slow and crushing from the get-go and thus writing another breakdown slower and with a different timing completely kills all the momentum because I guess every fucking deathcore song has to have a big ass breakdown at the end.

This is a somewhat curious listening piece, because it came at a transition point in its genre. The genre was just about to mature and transform completely, still going from the momentum of its inception but losing steam. In hindsight, Proprioception looks like an old and withered caterpillar right before it blossoms into a butterfly. The band makes cautious, insecure attempts to branch out on this album--most notably in the more melodic leads on "One of the Swarm" and the lighter closing track. The former doesn't work too bad, but the latter just seems like a feeble attempt to show that And Hell Followed With could, like, totally make normal music if they wanted to, man. The smartest decision these guys had was keeping their songs relatively short and concise, so no bad ideas ever get run into the ground, but overall Proprioception is very safe and does little to stray away from the familiar territory. Vocals are probably more on the shouty hardcore side of things than they are growly death metal, especially when he sings choppy rhythms during the breakdowns. You run-of-the-mill deathcore high is used as well. It's not necessarily generic, but everything about it is typical to its genre, if that makes sense. This comes at a crossroads between oldschool and new-school deathcore, but has pretty much no replay value outside of being that. And Hell Followed With probably would have slowly withered like about 90% of deathcore bands that popped up in their time, but fortunately for them Earache has particularly bad taste in this stuff. The only time a deathcore band like this possibly could have been signed to a big label was in the mid-00s, and it doesn't seem like much of a surprise that the band split up not long after this album.

The members know their way around the instruments--the rhythm section (while unfortunately the victim of awful song structuring) is well-done in its own right. This is obviously professionally done and all of that, but that shouldn't dictate whether or not a piece of music is worth your time in the slightest. Personally speaking, I liked some of the Black Dahlia Murder riffs, too, so there are some things I personally enjoy and can recommend about this, but it's hard to do so since everything is surrounded by so many bad breakdowns. If you're really itching to hear deathcore's last gasps before it moved on to proggy and pretentious territory, give Proprioception a listen, but outside of that historical value this has little to offer that you can't find in better bands.