DEATHCORE

Chelsea Grin playing their slow, boring music in Shady Oaks Retirement Home where it can be appreciated.

I recall fondly the days when I first began writing TNM. Arguing with teenagers every single day of my life was still a fresh, exciting, and almost overwhelming concept to me. Keep in mind you don't have to be between the ages of 13-19 for me to consider your dumbass a teenager. I've been berated by 30-somethings for "never getting laid" and being a "virgin" because I'm a metal writer on the internet, and that's what everybody who doesn't like you will call you, because they think it's clever and they think it hurts. They're just vaginas people. While not doubting how awesome they can be, it's not glorious or particularly difficult to put yourself in one on a regular basis, or at the very least once. Weird, ugly-looking people get action every day, just look at the parents who mistakenly made you. Nobody who's mentally past sophomore year of high school thinks you're a hot shot because your girlfriend let's you come inside her after following her orders all day every day. Unless you need it there to concentrate on your algebra homework, get your head out of high school. It's clearly too much of me to ask for you to pull it out from the depths of your ass.

I recall one of my very first reader objections, if not my actual first, was in regards to my violation post about ear gauging. The antagonist in question couldn't have been a day over 15. He proudly displayed a pair of freshly plugged earlobes himself on his Facebook profile picture, to spite his parents and society, no less. It was safe to say that because of his chosen fashion statement, he wasn't too thrilled about reading somebody's opinion on the internet knocking it. Or so I assumed, anyway. He didn't so much take issue with the actual content of the post, as he did with my featured photograph of Brent Riggs from JFAC. Clearly, reading was still an issue for him.

Without recalling his egregious grammatical and spelling errors, he asked something along the lines of "Why are you talking about JFAC? They're not even metal, they're deathcore."

First and foremost, I still get a comment along these lines either on the blog or Facebook, at least a few times a week. It never fails. "But that isn't metal..." Oh really, no shit? What's the name of my website, you genetic mishap? I wish there was some sort of physical or mental excuse you had for being as stupid as you are, but that's the funny thing about stupid: You just are, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Second, I go back and forth with whether Job for a Cowboy are either the best deathcore band ever, (which is like the best smelling turd) or just an incredibly sub par death metal band. They sounded strictly deathcore in their indie Doom days, but  after debuting on Metal Blade, they've been trying to go a bit more down the preferable death metal path. The genre debate regarding whether JFAC is currently a deathcore or death metal band continues to rage elsewhere on web forums and YouTube comment fights, so let's not bring it here. I'll simply end it with "they kinda suck" and move on.

I imagine full-sleeves can be quite a bargain when your arms are twizzlers. 

Deathcore is bland, forgettable, mediocre music. All of it. People will always get pissed at me for disregarding an entire musical genre, and not separating things from band to band. They think it makes me sound ignorant, or biased. That's the great thing about a genre like deathcore, though! I can have extensive knowledge about everything the genre has to offer, and still easily come to the conclusion that it all blows. In a nutshell, deathcore is just like it sounds. A portmanteau between the words death metal and hardcore punk. It's either death metal with hardcore influences, or hardcore with death metal influences. Not really sure... Considering the kids who play it, I'll assume the latter. Deathcore is what happens when either skinny emo kids or fat HxC kids try their best to play death metal for all their little friends at a basement show, tuning their music half a step lower, and trying to growl with their nasaly, under-developed boy voices. That is until a label like Victory Records recognizes they sound exactly like the rest of the bands that are making them money, and serves them a one-way ticket to a Vans Warped Tour stage in front of a sea of moist jailbait panties and size 6 Chuck Taylor feet.

Deathcore and the sub-genres like it, are really no more than a get-rich-quick scheme. Scenester kids have taken a tried and true formula like that of death metal, and given it a quick run through their musical money-making mainstream machine. The end result is this dumb-downed, uncomplicated, catchy, easy-to-digest bastardization of the original, designed specifically for the consumption and courting of brain dead teenage girls. (Grown men end up buying it and bug the band for autographs anyway.) Sound familiar? Core is to the 00's what glam and nu-metal were to the 80's and 90's. We metalheads on the elitist side of the fence, enduring fake metal from years before, have long-since recognized this fact, and are left with little option other than to spit our venom as usual, and ride out the years until the false poseur genre's inevitable demise. While of course we shall consistently remain. Patience, my brothers. It can't be much longer now. The girls buying this crap won't stay teenagers forever. Oliver Sykes will be pumping your gas -- er -- petrol before you know it.

One of these things is not like the other things. One of these things just doesn't belong.

So what makes a band deathcore and not death metal? The deathcore formula, much like the mind of its typical listener, is simple. Deathcore relies heavily on open-stringed, chug chug riffs, occasional metalcore guitar harmonies, and much more infamously, that little thing we like to call "the breakdown". Breakdowns are the sworn enemy to true metal elitists. They are the polar opposite of a sweet, epic, rip-roaring guitar solo. Which therefore makes them the least metal thing in existence. Guitar solos are everything. They are the life blood of true, beautiful metal and I will always stand by that. In the place of what should be a masterful, glorious, intricate, complex, melodic dancing of fingers against frets is instead a down-tuned, palm-muted, slow, boring, repetitive picking of an open E-string. Low B-string if they got it.

"This is the most Brutalest thing ... your ever heard..."

Are you still awake after all that? Me neither. I'm also not responsible for damages to your monitor if any of the images from the above video caused you to punch your screen. Before this whole core music debacle saw the light of the mainstream, I would use the words "break" and "down" typically if I wanted to describe something to a really stupid person who wasn't properly understanding me. For instance, "Let me break it down for you why you're a crybaby butthurt retard for being a vegan". Obviously, people still have a very hard time understanding me, but just as an example: You're hardly "sticking it to capitalism" if you're buying "Dole" and "Chiquita" products, instead of "KFC" and "McDonalds", moron. You want to stick it to capitalism? Kill yourself. It's a win-win situation. You can't be a consumer if you're dead, and then the rest of us no longer have to deal with you. I digress...

So like it sounds, a "breakdown" is a song break where the music is completely dumbed down for the audience. It's like CliffsNotes for music. Let's explain that this is a heavy song with some super extra sick amounts of heavy you're supposed to be moshing to in layman's terms. Snore. A breakdown-powered mosh pit is frail and weak. How does anyone get themselves so pumped up over open-note monotony? Guitar solos will always trump breakdowns. Scribble out everything else and put this equation in your mathbooks:

Guitar Solos > Breakdowns.

Are there deathcore songs that have guitar solos? Sure, if you count 8 seconds of jumbled high-notes as a guitar solo. No thanks. I'll also admit there are true metal songs out there that don't have their own guitar solo. The boring ones.

This little piggy cried "bree bree bree" all the way home.

Next on our list of things to berate about a dispensable genre such as deathcore, are its vocals. Sweet baby christ, my ears. Death metal is a vocal style that was built entirely on deep voices, or at the very least, the ability to make your voice sound deep. Low gutturals are the entire point. Your lisp-ridden, barely post-pubescent shriekery is nothing short of a disgrace. You don't cut it in the brutality department. You sound like the screaming, skinny emo nerd in the high school cafeteria who gets pushed too far by your bullies, thinking it will cause them to back off. But it only makes it worse, because your reaction was beyond hilarious, and they want to see if they can make you do it again. 

Show me someone who thinks inhaled pig squealing sounds brutal, and I'll show an eligible candidate for a fist to the throat. Not to say that it doesn't happen in actual death metal bands (same for breakdowns), but even when it does, I could do without it, and its far and few between in bands I consider listenable. In metal vocals, it makes sense to roar or growl like a bear or a wild cat. These animals are fierce and powerful, much like the metal genre should be. But a pig? That thing is bacon with legs. You couldn't pick a more boring (albeit delicious) animal to mimic. 

If you listen to deathcore, True Metal Redemption requires of you to set all of your bright pink, lime green, and baby blue slim-fit graphic tees aflame. Are you currently wearing one? Tough. Have the nurses in the burn unit record all of your screaming and whining like a girl, so you can mix it into your next album when they hose down all the charred Japanese flower tattoos on your necrotic tissue. Then, you need to listen to the bands Death, Obituary, Amon Amarth, Deicide, Exhumed, Nile, and Autopsy to purge all of the fake, weak death from your system, and replace it with pure, raw, unbridled brutality.

Deathcore in its very essence is Diet Death Metal. Death Metal Lite. I Can't Believe it's Not Death Metal. Why would you want to have fake, imitation tofu death metal when you can just enjoy the real thing?

Accept no imitations.