Make Them Suffer

Someone more involved with this kind of deathcore, please let me know: why, oh why do people keep tacking orchestras onto their otherwise normal deathcore songs? I'm just trying to figure out the rationale in people's heads when they say to themselves "You know what metalcore-influenced death metal needs? SYMPHONICS" and then splash them all over every single piece of the music. Winds of Plague did it and everyone laughed at them, but apparently there was one band in Australia that heard what they were doing and decided to clone them. I know, we're in the realms of a dystopian horror now, but bear with me. It gets better.

See, Make Them Suffer's music isn't bad at its core. At its absolute worst, it's just unremarkable deathcore that's played in a style I don't particularly like (i.e. it's not tard-bludgeoning; it's still firmly based in fluffy melodic death metal melodies). The amount of breakdowns is kept relatively low, unfortunately, but they've got a decent sense of rhythm and don't drag too badly. The riffs are decent for what they are and aren't exactly boring. The production is really dinky and underwhelming for deathcore, but I guess that's to be somewhat expected for a first demo. Hell, even the vocals are pretty competent for deathcore standards - the screams are a bit thin and wet for the genre, and sound like they'd be better suited for a punchy goregrind band, but they're contrasted with a meaty and forceful growl that sounds better than at least 90% of other deathcore vocalists can manage.

Nay, the problem with this lies in the cheap, gimmicky orchestral synths that are about as integral to the focus of the music as, I dunno, a fucking kazoo would be. They don't exist as a separate melodic entity, they just mindlessly follow the guitars around like a really, really loud baby duckling would trail after its mother. There's no sense of dynamics or build-up either, the negative aspects of which should be obvious if you've ever listened to a classical symphony before in your life. After existing in a state of general quiet for a while, real-world orchestras don't just suddenly start blasting abruptly like Make Them Suffer's cheap synthy orchestra does, they use gradual crescendos to introduce the various textures to the music. The biggest problem, though, is that the music obviously isn't designed to hold a bunch of pretty strings and stuff - it's vanilla melodic death metal riff-wise, guys, you can't just shove orchestras over it because that's not the kind of stuff orchestras are meant to play over. It'd be like if I tried to play Jungle Rot songs on a xylophone, the impact of it would be completely lost. Also, it's pretty amusing how the band insist on using symphonics over the breakdowns even when they have no discernible melody going on guitar-wise during those parts; and even when the breakdowns themselves are occasionally free of symphonics, the "cool-off" tremolo riffs that get shoved in between the chugging are slathered with them even if those sections only last for about half a second. Smooth, dudes.

This is probably better than Winds of Plague's first experiment with symphonics + deathcore, but that's probably just because Make Them Suffer have marginally better backing music and slightly less shitty production. The orchestras are just as poorly integrated, but in this demo's defense, at least they make their presence in the music known without being overpowering. They're just pointless - I guess the same thing could be said for this whole release. There isn't a point to this. Don't listen to things that are pointless.