Ol’ Qwerty Bastard

deathcore = ew

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Music Blog / RYM / Last.fm / Qwertyy's Journal of Music Reviews and Other Assorted Ramblings

The Batlord

I was drunk. Deathcore Week still happening though.

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Key

Guess not.

The Batlord

Guess so.

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The Batlord

Yeah, deathcore sucks. I know. But I was bored, so for the next month I'm going to be reviewing a colon load of deathcore albums of all shapes and sizes to try to give a complete view of the genre as a whole rather than just ignorantly calling it Suicide Silence worship and The Black Dahlia Murder.

I will be ****ting on a lot of these albums though. A lot. This isn't just a fluff piece for the bands I actually like, cause that would be dull. I'm going to be covering obscure bands and formative bands, as well as **** like Suicide Silence and Bring Me the Horizon. I'll be moving roughly chronologically in three sections: early deathcore/proto-deathcore (The Red Chord, The Black Dahlia Murder), later scene bands (Suicide Silence, Bring Me the Horizon), and then the latter day prog/tech deathcore bands (The Contortionist, Ovid's Withering).

Join me on this mildly entertaining ride through a genre nobody likes. Hopefully it should be enlightening, or at the very least amusing. So, without further ado, let's get started with all those early bands who developed deathcore into something that so many *******s would soon ruin...

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The Batlord

And now we kick off Deathcore Week (or Month or whatever) with pretty much one of the best things to come out of the movement, and possibly even the best. I honestly don't know what band would be patient zero for deathcore but one band that could conceivably lay claim, if not for being the first, to being one of the very first to popularize the genre and define its sound. It's too bad what would happen later, but this album should not be held responsible for ****ing Suicide Silence.

What we have here is obvious: brutal, techy death metal meets metal/mathcore. The breakneck savagery of Cryptopsy makes the best of friends with Dillinger Escape Plan's angular riffs, with some of the most stomping Zao breakdowns you've ever heard bringing the beer, and this house party of the damned is hosted by... the guy from Earth Crisis I guess? Insert whatever metalcore bellower you want fronting a death metal band and it works just as well.

But rather than being either repetitive, chuggy deathcore or an awkward, unfocused mishmash by a band trying way too hard to be technical, this album is totally cohesive and distinct. Pretty much every song rips and doesn't sound quite like anything else before or since, even with a legion of hack imitators desperately trying to. I'm going to review a lot of ****ing albums in the near future, and a lot of them are going to get either hate or faint praise, but this is one of the few that I can champion with absolutely no asterisk. This is simply one of the best deathcore, metalcore, death metal, or extreme metal albums you'll ever subject yourself to.

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Ol’ Qwerty Bastard

the red chord and despised icon are like the only deathcore bands i can get behind. bonus points to despised icon for being canadian though.

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Music Blog / RYM / Last.fm / Qwertyy's Journal of Music Reviews and Other Assorted Ramblings

The Batlord

I've found legitimately good deathcore bands over the last few days. Very few great ones, but more than a few that rise above the drek. There is certainly a lot of drek though. You should check out some of the early-00s bands, as they were often as much metalcore as deathcore, and didn't have any of the scene kid influences that infected the entire genre from the mid-00s on.

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Trollheart

Can none of these bands write? That's a hell of a lot of scrawls! Maybe it reflects the music? Good ta have ya back man! Even though none of this will interest me I always love reading your stuff so I'll be lurking in the shadows with a pair of earmuffs, clasping my eyes and quietly crying in the corner. Don't step on me.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

The Batlord

Honestly none of this will interest you. I'm just in it for a mention in your journal update thread tbh. I might rec you that Red Chord album out of curiosity though.

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