Yōkai

I've been sitting here behind my keyboard for minutes now just trying to find an idea of something worse that came out this year than a couple of Slovenian deathcore musicians taking up modern Japanese influence and aesthetics and combining them with an outdated cloud rap style. I unfortunately can't bid you much on that. It's beyond me why I praised this band for their one decent album, Void, back in 2016. The music itself on that record, being decent deathcore, I found the atrocious marketing tactics that the band used which was dickriding the "slam" wave (hurr hurr hurr we're a deathcore band that calls themselves slam xD that'll show em xD you guise are the SLAM POLICE if you disagree xD) god that was fucking.... gay. I should've been turned away by these guys' cringe personalities and childish humor at the get-go had I known it was gonna get worse as the years went on.

If it's not embarrassing enough that this central European 4-piece are surprisingly not high school children, which I myself would be inclined to believe if it weren't for the fact that the drummer and vocalist (the only remaining original members) are somehow in their 30s. It is rather the fact that the entire band sans the aforementioned members has walked out on this unit. Well I don't blame them. Both new guitarist duties for this album have since been handed over to an Italian and a Thai-Ameircan, which isn't surprising because why would anyone else in Slovenia besides these two jerkoffs have the morality to actually stand to perform this absolute horse shit?

Within Destruction's horrendous fourth studio album Yōkai is a trend of the week nu metalcore-cum-deathcore shitshow, if this came out in 2012, I guarantee you instead of trap beats, they'd be using dubstep wobbles. Why would they actually think this is a good idea? That's the kind of thought you'll have listening to this shit from start to end. While the deathcore elements aren't completely abolished, the vanilla nu metal and faux metalcore ingredients spoil the fun, sprinkle on top some wannabe trap bullshit and you've got the general idea of the recipe here. From the out-of-place intro to the djent-fueled second track it quickly becomes apparent that Within Destruction aren't the type of band attempting to work on their sound from album-to-album and they are instead a trendhopping joke which this album further shows they make no excuses for. Let’s look at their resumé; in 2012 they were playing melodic deathcore, in 2015-2018 they were playing brutal deathcore which was the appropriate time period to cash in on fake "slam" kids that thought trash like Vulvodynia was "slam", but as soon as those kids heard Devourment they knew it was time to move on and here we are. You guys are a bit late to the Yung Lean fandom, but good to see you made it (not).

Now I just have to mention, didn't Annotations of an Autopsy do something similar to what WD do with every album nearly 10 years ago? Why do we need another deathcore band drastically changing their sound every album to try to ride the tides of what's cool at the time? Well thankfully AOAA returned to brutal deathcore with a great EP not that long ago, which I much prefer you reading this go listen to rather than this shit. I spent two different occasions of my free time to hear this crap and I want that time back. And there's no turning back now, so I have to write about what I heard.

"Kings of Darkness" is essentially the only track on here which I found to be the only saving grace that preserves some of the deathcore elements of the band's previous records, there's also some parts in "No Mercy" and "Backstab" as well that resemble those moments but even then it's not like they're entire songs; which just goes onto prove that this really isn't the same band anymore. There's way too many moments which fill out the lack of creativity with diarrhea djent shit ... Why in the name of fuck is djent still a thing? Hearing djent tones in 2020 is like an audial queue for shitty bands to know that they're shitty. It almost saves you the work of deciding if you like it or not. At least it does for me. I'm not even going to comment on the J-rapper guest features because they're not memorable nor really do anything for these songs.

Being a lover of hip hop styles to the liking of trap/cloud rap/phonk since 2013, it just brings my piss to a boil that deathcore bands such as this have already been ass-raping slam death metal for years (despite not sounding anything like it, i’m only speaking from the fact that they ruined the name of slam for years as milked it for all it’s worth merely as a marketing term) and now they're attempting to cash in on meshing their deathcore nativity with trap because they heard a $uicideboy$ song on YouTube in the past 3 years?? Fuck off.

I am not completely against deathcore musicians pursuing eccentric musical alternatives (see Mitch Lucker & Big Chocolate's duo effort Commissioner for a brilliant hybridization of heavy electronic musicianship with brutal screams and growls), nor am I against the blatant outright influence of metal into trap music, I mean I loved Ghostemane when he was first coming out around 2015, even now I still listen to a lot of Gizmo and City Morgue, but the alternative approach of a metal band (particularly deathcore) attempting to pursue the genre is never not cringe as all fuck I mean let's not ignore the fact that Acrania's Luke Griffin even has his own shitty trap project where he growls over beats, hell even Impending Doom's Brook Reeves has one as well. Perhaps Within Destruction can collab with Lil Xan next year and create the ultimate shit biscuit the world has ever seen in recent music. Can we please just get a mutual agreement here that deathcore guys need to leave trap the fuck alone? It's never cool, it's never good, it always sucks and Within Destruction's Yōkai is just another example of such. Fuck this shit.