Gun

There’s a trend in genres that were previously seen as lowbrow and lacking refinement to attempt to implement more advanced theory and playing. It is common throughout the entirety of metal’s history and has a very inconsistent track record in terms of what it has produced. This might just be me but most of the time it has meant sacrificing songwriting and atmosphere in order to tame and de-claw the music. Interestingly enough, metal’s most infamous imitator, metalcore has started doing this after swoop-haired ripped off Gothenburg riffs started to become a popular target of mockery by even more commercially established sources. System Decay aren’t necessarily the strongest example of this, leaning more so towards the Killswitch Engage model of core than the breakdown-centric stupidity of the Job for a Cowboy/Whitechapel axis of deafcore. Don’t be fooled by websites labeling it as “progressive thrash”, this is everything terrible about 2004 – 2006′s mall-metal movement just dressed up to appear more accomplished. And it will only take seconds to see through this disguise.

Metalcore inherently fails because at its heart it is based around really simple and painfully obvious contrasts. It’s songwriting style is best thought of as “bad cop good cop”, with one mood being some vaguely confrontational sense of misdirected aggression and the other some fedora-tipping sense of euphoric release. This extends to the core structure of the songs, which can be summed up as simply as tasteless chug-chug-widdle-widdle lead riffs, working off of basic tension-build up and release with all the mandatory stop-start rhythms you got bored of after the underground realized that “yes djentlemen, you can mimic malfunctioning morse code quite well in the place of actual riffs. Now please get out of my backyard and let me listen to Watchtower in peace”. Right off the bat this neuters the riffing into a binary state between dumb blockhead rhythm and half-hearted lead melody but the blandness doesn’t stop there. Oh yes, the vocals are exactly what you’d expect and they are at this point hilariously bad. Welcome the return of “microphone cupping” styled tuff-gai shouts and its brother, “vaguely post-grunge sounding clean vocals”, sung by someone clearly relying too much on studio editing to carry a tune. One of them builds up a sense of RIGHTEOUS ANGER and the other butts in like a bad motivational speaker reaching the climax of some hammy, vague self-help advice and rides the sense of momentum.

There isn’t much else to say because this is all that’s being offered. It’s surprising something so mind-numbingly obvious and compositionally deficient is still being produced in 2014. Don’t buy it, don’t download it, and don’t even bother listening to it unless for some reason you feel like reliving the years when high school kiddies thought Trivium was reviving the slovenly metal genre and Bullet for my Valentine could be seen as thrash.

Originally posted on The Metal Observer