Artist: AFI

Album: Sing the Sorrow

Release: March 11th, 2003

Label: Dreamworks/Nitro

Listen here: Spotify | YouTube

Last November, Californian punk rockers AFI announced that they would play their acclaimed sixth studio album, 2003’s Sing the Sorrow, in full for the first and (reportedly) only time in their storied 32-year-long career.

This announcement was important, I think, for two reasons:

1. A one-off anniversary show is a measured act of purposeful nostalgia, a respectful (read: classy) acknowledgement of internal legacy without full-blown pandering and ‘shut up and play the hits, Grandpa’ acquiescence.

2. Sing the Sorrow (still) slaps, and the classics rightfully deserve their due.

So, let’s talk about the record and why it matters in the restless days of 2023.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

In Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994–2007), former Noisey columnist and celebrated music writer Dan Ozzi details the trials and tribulations of eleven bands—Green Day, Jawbreaker, Jimmy Eat World, Blink-182, At the Drive-In, The Donnas, Thursday, The Distillers, My Chemical Romance, Rise Against, Against Me!—as they ascended from underground indie obscurity to their big-league, major-label debut.

I absolutely devoured Ozzi’s book upon my first readthrough and, in particular, I appreciated how he was able to use theme and context to situate a band’s struggle within the larger ebb and flow of culture at the time, where shocking events like the sudden death of Kurt Cobain or the tragedy of 9/11 had drastic ripple effects within the realm of punk rock and alternative music.

However, as I mentioned in my book review for New Noise:

“If there’s an easy criticism to level against Sellout, it’s that there are likely many more interesting stories here that it leaves out. By Ozzi’s own admission, acts like The Gaslight Anthem, Reel Big Fish, and Cave In were early contenders and eventual runners-up, and one imagines that others like Sick of it All, AFI, and Fall Out Boy would yield interesting anecdotes as well.”

With the expanded paperback edition of Ozzi’s book including additional chapters focused on artists like Dashboard Confessional, Thrice, Anti-Flag, Less Than Jake, Jawbox, the Bronx, Cursive, and Murder by Death, the curious absence of AFI becomes even more notable.

In fact, and for reasons which I will go into shortly, I’d go as far as to suggest that no group within alternative music navigated the cultural inflection point of punk, hardcore and emo stretching from the mid-90s to the mid-00s better than this particular Californian quartet.

Things were moving very rapidly in the first half of the 2000s. Acts like Jimmy Eat World, The Used and Thursday all gained considerable traction, and within a few short years, others like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance would quickly become household names.

Terms like “goth” and “emo” were only beginning to enter the larger music discourse (albeit in recycled contexts from previous generational movements), and there was already a vast undercurrent of alternative acts ready to take advantage of this newfound attention and the wandering eyes/ears of casual MTV audiences. And yet, in those early middle years, mainstream attention was still very much up for grabs and prospects for success were daringly uncertain. It was a burgeoning cultural space where groups could risk setting the terms of their own musical ascension. Or, at the least, give it a shot.

Enter ‘East Bay hardcore’ veterans AFI: original vocalist Davey Havok, original drummer Adam Carson, bassist Hunter Burgan, and guitarist Jade Puget.

With punk bonafides already stretching back a full decade—including five full-length albums and connections to Rancid’s Tim Armstrong (who produced their first record), The Offspring’s Dexter Holland (Nitro Records founder), and Tiger Army’s Nick 13 (member of Influence 13 along with Puget)—the group had already toured extensively and paid their road-dog dues, earning the credibility necessary to justify a certain degree of creative latitude within punk’s notoriously rigid cultural mores.

1999’s Black Sails in the Sunset incorporated shades of dark melodrama and romanticism within their established, upbeat hardcore sound, while 2000’s The Art of Drowning fused their notable affinity for horror punk with the anthemic clean choruses of 2000s pop punk, proving that the quartet possessed the skills necessary to craft devastating, stadium-ready hooks.

As it turned out, Sing the Sorrow would end up being my introduction to the world of AFI, and I imagine I’m not alone in this respect.

The record’s singles—“Girls Not Grey,” “The Leaving Song Pt. II,” and “Silver and Cold”—were utterly inescapable on late-night rock video TV programming, and every facet of the band seemed, to me, at least, be the epitome of cool. From their punk rocker aesthetic and Havok’s androgynous presentation to the album’s gothic-tinged concept, fantastical escapism and lyrical focus, there was a style and delivery to Sing the Sorrow that I hadn’t encountered anywhere else.

As their major label debut for Dreamworks, pedigree and patience became primary concerns for LP#6. Working closely with the production team of Butch Vig (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins) and Jerry Finn (blink-182, Rancid, Green Day), AFI were able to take the time necessary to craft the album in a more painstaking, deliberate fashion rather than the often frantic rush to record utilised on previous full-lengths.

As Havok notes in a Backspin video on their 2003 album, the band were holed away for months with Finn (and occasionally Vig) for the Sing the Sorrow sessions, including extended time for Havok’s vocal tracking. The end result is a record that emphasises each unique aspect of a member’s skill set across twelve diverse tracks: Carson’s playful rhythms and inventive fills; Burgan’s methodical fretwork and dialled-in bass tone; and Puget’s roaring guitar sound, at once classically metal in its tonality and intricacy, while also being rooted in the strumming defiance of punk’s ‘three chords and the truth.’

Even Havok’s energetic banshee yell was tempered and fortified into a powerful melodic croon—even if his high-pitch vocal timbre wasn’t exactly for everyone’s tastes. (In his review of the album for EW, Jim Farber said of Havok: “[He] owns the squeakiest voice in current rock. Think early Geddy Lee imitating a squirrel.”)

Across the record, AFI manage to deftly refine and perfect an engaging fusion of their disparate collective influences: Rancid, the Smiths, Bauhaus, Slayer, the Cure, Guns N' Roses, Refused, and many more. Whether it’s through sweaty breakneck tempos (“Dancing Through Sunday”), extravagant power balladry (“This Time Imperfect”), call-and-response urgency (“Silver and Cold”), or industrial clang meets sweeping melodrama (“Death of Seasons”), each element of the album sounds rich, warm, and cohesive twenty years on.

And yet, in looking back on the record through the lens of nostalgia and legacy, everything you need to know about Sing the Sorrow and the potency of AFI’s distinct punk rock alchemy is present—ready, waiting and fully formed—on the album’s standout deep cut: “This Celluloid Dream.”

Bursting through with a quickfire percussive cavalcade from Carson and Puget’s insanely catchy lick, the track is quickly propelled into the kind of stop-start mayhem that could easily translate from a DIY youth hall to a crowded stadium floor.

With layered vocals and triumphant gang shouts, “This Celluloid Dream” then takes one of the quartet’s best-ever choruses and lets it soar to dizzying new heights. Havok has never sounded more anthemic and in the pocket than when he’s belting out that “you’re so cinematic” refrain. It’s real rockstar stuff. Along with careful use of tension and tactical backing guitar harmonies, each moment of the track sports an ear-worm hook ready to borrow deep in your brain, the type of melody that can be endlessly hummed and sung absent-mindedly without any need for lyrical comprehension.

But, alas, if that’s what you’re after, Havok’s Edgar Allan Poe-aping poetic tendencies have you covered there, too, with a devastating third verse stanza:

“In the glitter, in the dark, sunk into velvet/

Praying this will never end.

In the shadow of a star, in static pallor/

I realized I never began.”

In late 2016, I interviewed all four members of AFI for the release cycle of their self-titled tenth record (2017), otherwise known in fan circles as the ‘Blood Album.’ When asked Havok if he and the band factored in their own legacy into the creative process in a way that was consciously self-aware and reflexive, Havok’s response was politely dismissive but undeniably fascinating:

“To me, no record means more than the other record. They’re moments in time, and those moments were definitely important. But as the people who are involved in creating them, we don’t have that separation of records that you do as a listener.”

Expanding on whether an AFI record should be conceived as the product of a singular, creative vision or merely just the greater sum of its individual parts, Havok took pains to emphasise the fluidity of progression:

“I would say the latter is more accurate. However, as with all albums, there are moments of referential themes that connect the record together, and that happens organically in the writing process. As we write, we write a huge amount of songs, and [slowly] they tend to merge both thematically and tonally so that even with the greater amount of songs that you see appearing on the record, there is that continuity.”

This insight into AFI’s creative mindset allows me to rethink Sing the Sorrow in new and interesting ways.

It’s clear from interviews that each one of the band’s four members did not set out to write a ‘classic’ or actively break into the mainstream. And yet, their experience in the California hardcore punk scene allowed them to channel creative expression in ways that retained a sense of authenticity and idiosyncrasy that generated progression without sacrifice or compromise, yielding rich and dynamic results in the process.

For a more comprehensive deep dive into this record, check out our upcoming Deep Cuts episode on The Pitch of Discontent podcast, where Wil Collins (Candescent A.D/Prosthetic Records) joins the show to chat about Sing the Sorrow and the startling impact of AFI’s magnum opus. Listen below:

Artist: Motor Ace

Album: Five Star Laundry

Release: March 5th, 2001

Label: Sputnik (Festival Mushroom Records)

Listen here: Spotify | YouTube

Growing up in a small country town, I savoured any opportunity to travel to the “city,” i.e. the slighter larger country town approximately three hours’ drive away.

While my parents ran errands and purchased essential items, I would squirrel myself away to various outlets looking for magazines, nerdy sci-fi books, very ~cool~ skate shop clothing, and new music to consume. This was important because, right around the turn of the millennium, I was beginning to develop my own musical taste as I entered high school. A close family friend had burned a bunch of CD-Rs for me to browse through, and these filled my cherished zip-up wallet (remember those?) with selected tomes of the nu-metal, skate punk, and white-people rap variety.

One winter, I picked up a CD compilation that would end up changing the trajectory of my musical discovery for years to come. And it was within that two-disc sampler that I discovered Melbourne post-grunge rockers Motor Ace and their debut album, Five Star Laundry.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

As a rambunctious teenager looking to push boundaries and test parental waters, nothing screams “LISTEN TO ME NOW!” than a CD with a huge “Warning: This Record Contains Explicit Language” advisory sticker. Not that my parents actually gave a shit, often swearing more themselves than any potentially corrupting musical influence (thanks, Mum), but my point still stands.

The Xtreme music two-disc CD compilation came out in 2001 and featured a choice selection of Australian and North American artists, including Powderfinger, Machine Gun Fellatio, Superheist, Killing Heidi, 28 Days, Frenzal Rhomb, Grinspoon, Sunk Loto, One Dollar Short, Queens of the Stone Age, 3 Doors Down, Papa Roach, Live, Lit, Marilyn Manson, New Radicals, Bloodhound Gang, Godsmack, Wheatus, Jurassic 5, and many more.

It’s a veritable who’s-who of 2000-era Channel [V] programming (if you know, you know), so you best believe I bought this one immediately.

I have this distinct memory of driving home and dropping this bad boy into my battered silver SONY Walkman ESPMAX D-E225 (if you know, you know) and immediately hitting play. I was familiar with maybe one-third of the artists on the comp, so this was prime time for new tunes, and my ears were hot and ready.

Four tracks deep into disc one, the intro for “Hey Driver” kicks in. This is also the opening track to Five Star Laundry, and it’s quite possibly the perfect introduction to the glorious intersection of grunge and alt-rock.

Drummer Damian Costin marches into the mix with consistent rimshots and playful hi-hats, followed by a jangly lead guitar lick and thick, bottom-end thrum. Swelling noise and feedback from Craig Harnath’s warm production adds to the track’s rising intensity right before a huge snare roll announces the wall of riffage to come from axe-men Patrick Robertson and Dave Ong.

While I was already familiar with “loud” music, this sound was entirely new to me. The visceral feeling you get when a wall of overdriven riffs hits your teenage brain pleasure centre could likely fill a thousand psychology textbooks.

Robertson’s distinctly Melbourne affect, delivered through lyrical nods to fear and anxiety, was all too relatable at the time, and I often went back and listened to this track excessively, over and over again, trying to dissect exactly why I loved it so much. Every guitar accent, every snare hit, every vocal melody and harmony—it was all alluring and exciting, and I was utterly hooked.

Once I had a copy of Five Star Laundry, I found more to love and even more to obsess over. I’ve adored this record for over two decades, and hearing the chorus of the LP’s title track still makes me sing along at No-One-Is-Listening-So-I-Don’t-Care volume every single time. It’s a banger tune and one of the group’s best.

Slowing things down to a more mid-tempo vibe, the quartet master the push-pull dynamics of iconic pop songwriting. The interplay of rhythm and lead guitar lines shimmer and bounce of Robertson’s soaring chorus melody, rising aptly to meet his final hung high notes.

The verses also feature these little pinched notes from Ong in the empty space of Costin and bassist Matt Balfe’s locked-in groove, perfectly complementing Robertson’s emphatic shouted vocals.

With one of the strongest Side A runs that I can think of, Five Star Laundry finally lets its guard down on a certified tearjerker, described by Matt Hayman in a street press review from the album’s release cycle as “a power ballad soaked in youthful self-pity.”

Over a sombre acoustic intro and engaging verse, “Lorenzo” finds Robertson waxing lyrical about watching late-night infomercials and unwanted solitude. His verses accurately describe the feeling of romantic “limbo,” where you know (or suspect?) that your lover is out with someone else, and all you have to lean on are the dark corners of your own thoughts.

“Someone else standing in my shoes/
Count the hours since he left his boots behind.
Still in limbo, think I’ll stay up late/
This infomercial’s got me lifting weights for you.”

Driving into a soaring chorus, Robertson stretches and elongates certain syllables across different pitches—an effect known as melisma in music theory—rising and falling with the track’s instrumental. It’s a unique and powerful performance choice, one that serves to accentuate and intensify the loneliness and desperation of the track’s lyrics. Youthful self-pity, indeed.

In 2001, my romantic period of crushes and affection was only just beginning, yet I’ve since grown around and within Robertson’s storytelling on Five Star Laundry, finding expressions and ideas codified in his lyrics that required adolescent chemistry, adult aimlessness, and far too many beers to unlock.

While it might not have achieved the same level of acclaim and status as other early 2000s Aussie staples, Five Star Laundry remains important to me for its enduring relevance and impeccable musicianship.

It’s the record that got me to think seriously and earnestly about rock at a pivotal point and broadened my taste in the sounds of grunge, shoegaze, Brit-pop, and so much more.

I was fortunate enough to see Motor Ace following their 2018 reformation and witness the glory of Five Star Laundry up close and in person on their 2019 headline tour. And more recently, the band have even put out new material, including the playful single “Knock Knock.”

Hearing these songs come alive in person was a true bucket list moment for my teenage self, watching a band that I thought I’d missed by a handful of years playing songs that I absolutely cherish to a packed room of people who—likely, I surmised—felt exactly the same way.

For a more comprehensive deep dive into this record, check out our upcoming Deep Cuts episode on The Pitch of Discontent podcast, where my lovely co-host and I go through select tracks from Five Star Laundry and discuss Motor Ace’s origin, career and overall impact. Listen below:

You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.

Artist: Pallbearer

Album: Sorrow and Extinction

Release: February 21st, 2012

Label: Profound Lore

Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify

For reasons I’ve only truly begun to grasp a decade on, 2012 was a transitional year for me. I was turning 24, largely disaffected at an emotional level, and looking for new experiences to enrich the internal perception of my otherwise mundane (and, it must be stated, largely privileged and trauma-free) private life.

In terms of music, this meant actively seeking discovery and pushing past previously conceived ‘boundaries’. And thankfully, this catalyst lead to many fortunate finds that I still hold dear today: Lucero’s hootin’-and-hollerin’ alt-country, Killer Mike’s smooth flow and incisive class-consciousness rap style, Coliseum’s moody post-punk, Now, Now’s delightful indie-pop, We Lost The Sea’s sprawling post-metal palette… You get the idea. However, perhaps the most important find of that decade, the one that’s had the single largest impact on my musical taste, comes from an unlikely source.

Let’s talk about the debut album from Arkansas doom metal juggernaut Pallbearer: Sorrow and Extinction.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

Okay, what is doom metal exactly, you ask? Well, according to the authoritative “Doom Metal Music Guide,” available through MasterClass with instruction from Rage Against the Machine axeman Tom Morello (yes, you read that correctly; no, I did not have a stroke), it’s this:

“The doom metal music genre stems from the heavy, blues-based riffing of Black Sabbath and has expanded to hard rock and heavy metal scenes throughout the world.”

So far, so good. But what does this expansion sound like? At the aural level, the genre is broad enough to encompass a variety of progressive experimentation within the formal constraints of metal, including drone, sludge, stoner rock, folk, and symphonic elements. Think Cathedral, Electric Wizard, Candlemass, The Obsessed, etc. This subgenre fusion can also be seen in the heavy use of stylistic prefixes, helping to denote which particular variant or shade of doom you’re getting: epic, gothic, death, funeral, black, etc. And to me, this progressive versatility is one of the many strengths of doom metal.

As Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell put it in the updated and expanded edition of Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Across Time and Genre (2021):

“We would argue that this confirms metal in its many guises as one of the main locations of authentic progressive rock of the 2000s. It was into and out of metal that progressive rock found new blooms over a period of two decades, opening up to new fusions within and moving out from metal genres and approaches.” (355)

What makes Sorrow and Extinction such a compelling example of contemporary doom metal done right is its flawless execution of the genre’s constitutive parts.

Tempo

At the formal level, tempo is the “speed” of a musical composition, and most of the time, we’re aware of it without needing to perceive it consciously. Doom metal, in contrast to most other genres then, is slow. Often extremely slow, frequently bordering on turgid and glacial. This is perhaps the genre’s signature stylistic device, making metal that feels interminable and (mostly) static.

On “Foreigner,” the album’s twelve-minute opening opus, Pallbearer make expert use of cathartic suspension and release to devastating effect. The track’s first two minutes play out through a gradual wash of ambient sound before a towering tsunami of distortion crashes into the listener, lurching along with punctuated drum hits and vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell’s Ozzy-esque wail.

Much of the track continues in this vein, stuck in the vice grip of the quartet’s hypnotic thrall, providing little variation in tone or composition, until arriving at the rich guitar harmonies and crushing climax of the song’s final epic crescendo.

Rhythm

One thing Pallbearer do obscenely well is a well-crafted and thoroughly rewarding rhythmic shift. My favourite track, “Devoid of Redemption,” also happens to be the shortest on the record (clocking in at a brisk eight minutes, mind you), but don’t let this concision fool you. There’s plenty going on here under the hood.

Campbell and co-guitarist Devin Holt trade-off against one another against one of the band’s most recognisable riff progressions, while drummer Zach Stine punctuates each bar with the steady clang of the ride cymbal. At moments, it feels like the composition is full of some dark unnamed force desperately straining and yearning to be set free.

Then, around the 3:45 mark, everything is set loose, thrusting the track into the depths of grinding, unrelenting sonic chaos. Campbell and Holt lose themselves in these murky depths as Stine and bassist Joseph Rowland attempt to maintain order through subterranean rumble and clashing percussion.

Vocal Style

Speaking of Ozzy, let’s talk more about Campbell’s pipes. While finding a doom band in 2022 (or 2012, for that matter) is a ridiculously easy task, finding one with actual skills in the vocal department is a much taller order of business.

As Brad Sanders wrote for Stereogum earlier this year, “Campbell’s superpower as a singer is his vulnerability.” In truth, his gift is making his voice achieve the lofty ambition of paradoxical duality.

On a track like “The Legend,” Campbell’s quaking register feels both majestic and morose, melancholy and urgent; effortlessly sliding around Holt’s crunching riffage and Stine’s gradual seismic shifts (who would later leave the band after recording the album).

Narrative

In terms of lyrical content, Sorrow and Extinction doesn’t really invent the doom metal wheel—but it also has no need to. Sure, standard themes dominate—death, sadness, loss, time—and are woven together with a suitable amount of theatrical grandeur. It’s a testament, then, to Pallbearer’s thematic execution that such boilerplate ideas can approach mythic reverence and become transcendent when given an appropriate soundtrack.

The midsection of “An Offering of Grief,” bookended by minutes of plaintive acoustic wandering, finds Campbell ruminating on celestial wonders, daring to find solace outside the flesh and in the heavens above:

“Let me search the distant stars for what is left of my ruin.
Inhaling the stillness, I make silence my temple.
And place an offering of grief/
A communion with the soul.”

As the track draws to a close, dizzying riffs and distant shouts pile up end on end, sounding every bit like a chorus of the damned, adding emotional stakes to this material realm of “shadows” and “deception.”

Likewise, closer “Given to the Grave” rests on a single uttered stanza that wrestles with the existential heft of the album’s title, stretched across the ponderous expanse of the track’s ten-minute composition and hazy synth soundscapes:

“Carry me to my grave/
When at long last, my journey has ended.
On the path that leads from here into oblivion/
And no more sorrow can weigh me down.”

Taking in Sorrow and Extinction ten years on from its initial release, it’s hard to think of another debut record that showed this much promise. It certainly wasn’t lacking in accolades—the album scored a Best New Music recommendation from taste arbiters Pitchfork, rave reviews from notoriously fickle publications like Angry Metal Guy and Metal Injection, along with positions in a number of end-of-year lists. By my own metrics, though, it kicked off a fanatical obsession with Pallbearer and doom metal more generally, which continues in earnest to this day.

I featured the album in my Best of the 2010s series, along with each consecutive release: 2014’s Foundations of Burden and 2017’s Heartless. And with the exception of The Menzingers, it’s difficult to find another band that consistently places in that list across three releases and an entire decade. As I wrote in my review of the group’s most recent effort, 2020’s Forgotten Days:

“When Pallbearer lock into a groove and march relentlessly into long-form compositions, it feels as instinctive as breathing…. Pallbearer have always been more than just a doom band. Across their critically acclaimed back catalogue, the quartet have already tackled the crushing and commercial, the soaring and sentimental, the melodic and melancholy.”

You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.

Artist: Hatebreed

Album: The Rise of Brutality

Release: October 28th, 2003

Label: Universal Music Group

Listen here: Youtube | Spotify

This one will differ slightly from my usual Deep Cuts retrospective format, but I promise it has the goods. So, aahhh, bear with me, okay? Cool? Cool.

Despite what you may assume based purely on their name, metalcore progenitors Hatebreed aren’t solely focused on feelings of loathing, disgust, and pessimistic sentiments of intense negativity. And sure, looking at examples of the group’s more popular tracks (“Looking Down the Barrel of Today” and “Destroy Everything,” to name just a few) might lead one to think the lyrical content skews heavily towards gestures of violence and outward hostility. Which, I will admit, it often does (to a point).

Yet, as frontman Jamey Jasta told the Daily Nebraskan in 2002, the Connecticut outfit are much more than just angry meathead dudes being angry for anger’s sake:

“Some people only hear the heavy… But even though the music is heavy, it’s tangible, people can relate to it."

For me, this tangibility comes in many forms: inspiration, motivation, catharsis—all feelings that have, I would argue, resolutely positive connotations. What I want to do here is interrogate this positivity and get down to the philosophical core at the heart of one of my favourite records: 2003’s The Rise of Brutality.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

Looking at Hatebreed’s storied twenty-five career, it’s easy to see consistent threads running through the band’s album titles and lyrical themes:

• Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire (1997) > “complacency hinders aspiration”

• Perseverance (2002) > “striving for success in the face of adversity”

• Supremacy (2006) > “ascendancy, dominion, authority”

• The Divinity of Purpose (2013) > “seeking determination in belonging”

• The Concrete Confessional (2016) > “accepting the shame of hard living”

In my New Noise review of their most recent effort, 2020’s Weight of the False Self, I summed up the band’s overarching thematic vision:

“Jamey Jasta has made a career out of turning shouted screeds into adrenaline-fuelled motivational seminars, spitting the truth in the form of inspiring affirmations on the value of personal growth and overcoming adversity.

At this point, the Hatebreed frontman, podcaster, and former Headbangers Ball host is essentially the hardcore Tony Robbins. So, in this way, listening to a new Hatebreed record in 2020 is as much an exercise in therapeutic self-determination as it is exhilarating and blood-pumping.”

Turning to The Rise of Brutality, there are two tracks in particular that I feel exemplify this idea of “therapeutic self-determination” as delivered through “exhilarating and blood-pumping” sonic sermons.

The album’s lead single, “This Is Now,” has temporal questions as its primary focus. Over Sean Martin’s crushing lead riff and Matt Byrne’s pounding percussion, Jasta grips the mic and dips into the nature of time itself:

“Another memory and I'm asking myself/

How can I let the past be the past?

Once and for all, take a hold of the future/

And not let it control what I aspire to have.”

Here, Jasta gestures to the contemporary debate that continues to rage between two temporal ontologies: presentism and eternalism.

A presentist position states that everything exists at a specific point or slice of time, whereas the eternalist position is that things exist at other times. Put simply, for the presentist, only the present moment is “real”; for the eternalist, all times are “equally real” and exist—past, present, and future through infinity.

By analysing the frequency of words in Jasta’s lyrics across the album, we can see how emphasis is placed on the specific quality of existence. For instance, words like “this,” “is,” and “now” occur 37, 47, and 20 times, respectively, more so than scant occurrences of words like “future” (2) and “past” (2).

For Jasta, his own stance on this debate, his core “belief,” becomes clearer as the track moves into a bouncy, uplifting chorus punctuated by furious chugging and layered gang vocals:

“‘Cause this is now.

How can I change tomorrow, if I can’t change today?

This is now.

If I control myself, I control my destiny.”

As the chorus acknowledges, the ability to guide and shape one’s life requires control and the possibility of change. In this view, the evocation of “now,” of the primacy and importance of the present moment, becomes the thematic core of the song and, I would argue, of The Rise of Brutality as a whole.

This is all good, but what does it tell us about the record’s philosophy? Well, I want to argue that Jasta takes on a unique formulation of “thisness presentism” on The Rise of Brutality.

The main hurdle to overcome with adherence to eternalism is its inconsistency with our phenomenological intuitions as they relate to the passage and experience of time.

As human beings, we perceive things changing as a causal flow of events, where our experienced present continually advances into the future. We also have access to events experienced in the past that we do not have for the future, suggesting that reality (as experienced) conforms to a fixed past and an unfixed, open future.

As Natalja Deng writes in her review of David Ingram’s Thisness Presentism: An Essay on Time, Truth, and Ontology (2019):

“On thisness presentism, while there (presently) are all the thisnesses of wholly past entities, as well as those of present entities, there are no thisnesses of wholly future entities.

Thus, this presentist view seems well positioned to reap some of the benefits of the growing block view (on which past and present exist but the future does not). And indeed, one suggested benefit is that the view allows one to hold that the future, unlike the past, is open or unsettled.”

By embracing thisness presentism, Jasta and Hatebreed are able to reap the benefits of a fixed past, using the trials and tribulations of human experience as thematic fodder for lyrical motivations about changing one’s circumstances, controlling your destiny, and doing a “Carpe diem” (“seize the day”).

As independent scholar Johnny Harboe writes:

“The narrator is placed in the now, not only reflecting on the past and preparing for the future, but he is determined to change the future, to take hold of his life and change his life.”

We can see this most clearly in the second track of note, the album’s second single, “Live for This.”

Over another stellar pump-up riff from Martin, accented by Byrne’s pummeling double-kick fusillade, a constant refrain rings out: “Live for this, Live, Live!”

The repetition here is crucial, as it denotes how the present must be experienced, over and over again, to be truly lived within its own temporal confines. Moving into the first verse, Jasta lets us know why this is important:

“Through the best and the worst, the struggle and sacrifice/

For the true who’ve remained and the new blood.

Motivation, undying allegiance/

Striving through the hardships and affliction.”

Without a conception of the past, without an acknowledgement of its thisness, its continuing impact and relevance to decisions and choices made in the present, these lyrics would be effectively drained of their motivational power. As Jasta utters in the track’s rousing chorus:

“If you don't live for something, you'll die for nothing.”

In the context of “Live for This,” then, the this is the now, the present and the real, and only through reflection and action can we ever hope to wrestle with the need and desire for control and change.

“What we have are not possessions we own/

It's not weighed by greed or personal gain.

This is real, a desire for freedom.

A place apart from a world in abandon.”

We can read this desire for freedom as a reflection of the existential anxiety sitting at the heart of works by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855).

As Francesco Orilia notes for Manuscrito in “On the Existential side of the Eternalism-Presentism Dispute”:

“[Kierkegaard] points out, in The Concept of Anxiety, that the present is the vantage point wherefrom an array of genuine future possibilities are displayed for us to choose.

This freedom can be exciting, but the choices before us can be of momentous importance, up to the point of being characterizable as choosing ourselves, as decisions regarding what we want to be; in Kierkegaard’s theological language, they can be a matter of settling for eternity on either salvation or damnation.

Thus, freedom means also the angst arising from the burden of feeling responsible for one’s actions.”

We can see a lot of Kierkegaard’s philosophy reflected in Hatebreed’s back catalogue; in particular, their later albums, which emphasise theological themes as a way to think through the burdens and obligations placed upon human subjects in the phenomenal world.

However, all of this philosophizing shouldn’t be taken as a way to diffuse or detract from The Rise of Brutality’s more visceral and hard-hitting moments.

Tracks like “Doomsayer” and “Beholder of Justice” still feature some of Jasta & Co.’s most iconic breakdowns and knuckle-dragging pit calls, leaning emphatically into the “exhilarating and blood-pumping” side of things rather than their strictly “therapeutic self-determination” aspects. And in my mind, this is what makes Hatebreed so compelling within the world of metal and hardcore: their dogged ability to blend cathartic forms of violence and aggression with an overall insightful philosophical outlook.

After all, as I said in my New Noise review:

“The world continues to shit itself almost daily, and channelling some of our surplus rage and anger might just be a healthy form of output. After all, we’re not talking about Safebreed, or Respectbreed, or even Pull-Yourself-Up-By-Your-Bootstraps-breed. This is Hatebreed.”

As Jasta said, some people may only hear the heavy, and that’s on them.

You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.

Artist: Coliseum

Album: Sister Faith

Release: April 30th, 2013

Label: Temporary Residence Ltd.

Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify

In his scene report for Bandcamp titled “A Guide to Louisville Post-Hardcore,” Kevin Warwick outlines how the bustling Kentucky hub worked to distinguish itself from other alternative American hotspots like Seattle, Washington and San Diego during the major-label clamouring years of the 90s and 00s.

Warwick’s piece hits all the big names you’d expect—June of 44, Rodan, The For Carnation, and luminaries Slint—while also nodding to more contemporary acts who kept the city’s distinct and eclectic brand of post-hardcore alive: Crain, Elliott, The National Acrobat, and Young Widows.

And along with that storied list of Kentucky road dogs, you’ll also find mention of Coliseum: a hardcore punk trio that spent twelve restless years on stage and in the studio, thrashing and mutating themselves through bursts of metallic-tinged fury to meditative punk and sensual indie.

Yet the one release that stands tall above their substantial discography is the trio’s incredible fourth album, Sister Faith.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

For any punk band worth their salt, the idea of remaining static and stylistically stagnant is an emphatic death knell. Creativity comes from growth; growth is found by continually pushing the sonic envelope, taking risks, and, ultimately, seeing what sticks.

“I don’t think that punk is an idea that is constraining in any way; that’s the beauty of it,” Coliseum frontman Ryan Patterson told Music & Riots magazine in 2015:

“Punk for me, is about thinking and living outside of the lines, looking at everything askew in order to find the beauty or ugliness in it all. That spirit is certainly there because it’s part of our DNA and it’s in our hearts, but we’ve always pushed ourselves to look to the future with our music. We’re far away from where we started, but that is still entirely us at the same time.”

Across their twelve-year career, it’s clear that Coliseum never felt constrained by genres or fan expectations. Their artistry was as much defined by profound desire as by genuine curiosity.

Starting out as a metal-tinged hardcore band in the vein of Cursed and American Nightmare, with heavy riffs, aggressive rhythms, and throat-shredding roars (see their essential 2005 Goddamage EP or 2007's No Salvation), things started to switch up with the release of their third full-length album, 2010’s House with a Curse.

The trio had found a way to weave a distinctly 90s post-hardcore verve into their abrasive yet eerily melodic punk rock fabric, with acclaimed producer J. Robbins (Jawbox, Burning Airlines, Paint It Black) helping to mix the record.

This welcome change ultimately signalled a new direction for the group, one that harkened back to the glory days of the Dischord Records catalogue rather than the metal-centric wheelhouse of their former home, Relapse Records.

As Patterson confessed to BrooklynVegan in 2010:

“I pretty much always [wanted] to work with J. on everything... I love his music, I love his recordings, I love the guy. He and I have a pretty great connection that I appreciate very much, we seem to have a lot of similar influences and ideas about music, and of course, some of that is because of the fact that I am a huge fan of his bands and grew up listening to the music made by him and his contemporaries.”

With their J. connection now firmly established and solidified across several split releases and their Parasites (2011) companion EP, work began in earnest on LP#4 in 2012, alongside the inclusion of a new member, bassist Kayhan Vaziri.

Listening to Sister Faith, one first notices just how electric and lively the band’s sound had become. After a squall of feedback and crashing cymbals from drummer Carter Wilson on album opener “Disappear From Sight,” Patterson locks into a hypnotic groove that jangles throughout the tune, with occasional space for flashy notes and thick riff gestures. It’s a propulsive start but one that’s ultimately short-lived, lasting for three seconds shy of two minutes—a hardcore rager through and through.

Savouring this sense of raw momentum, “Last/Lost” and single “Doing Time” latch onto this rocking formula and run out the fucking door with it. Each track rests on simple yet effective riff progressions, with Vaziri and Wilson in tight lockstep, directed by the call-and-response of Patterson’s gravelly mid-range yell. And with a master like Robbins behind the boards, this instrumental texture works to rival the immediacy and chemistry of post-hardcore heights of acts like Fugazi and Hüsker Dü.

But it’s on “Love Under Will” where things start to get interesting. Patterson’s vocals move into a lower, more subdued register, with hushed lyrics that speak to the record’s existential ruminations on death, family, belonging, and ritual:

“Take down these words as written/

Love is the law.”

Sequenced directly after three Side A barnburners, this expansive five-minute number lets Coliseum slow right down and breathe with noticeably exhilarating results. Vaziri’s delicate finger plucking plods along patiently while Patterson’s riffs alternate between rippling shine and ecstatic crunch. As Evan Minsker notes in his Pitchfork review of Sister Faith:

“While every other song on the album ramps up both feedback and power, ‘Love Under Will’ smolders. Patterson’s growl is tempered, there’s more room between each drum hit, and everything is marked by more echo and empty space. Although it could easily be a metaphor for a crumbling relationship, it outlines the terrifying prospect of what love means when you believe in eternity.”

Stylistically, “Love Under Will” sounds like the band’s most stark detour yet, and it fits them like a glove—one they’re all too happy to try on repeatedly across the record, especially on cuts like the shimmering “Late Night Trains” and the anthemic love ballad “Everything In Glass”.

However, another aspect of Sister Faith that’s often occluded or outright ignored is just how damn fun it is. More than any other album in Coliseum’s broad back catalogue, this one understands the vibe and energy of a kick-ass punk rock show and nails the delivery.

Listen to the snarling lyricism of “Bad Will,” the cranking verse riff on “Used Blood,” or the Torche-esque stoner bulldozer “Fuzzbang,” and tell me you don’t immediately want to neck some pints and bang your head into oblivion. (Of course, you do.)

This vibe doesn’t get any more perfect than on “Black Magic Punks”—quite possibly the most complete and singular Coliseum track in existence.

While Patterson’s lyricism often skews towards inward dialogues of morality and questions of meaning through action, “Black Magic Punks” is pure punk rock escapism at its finest.

Off the back of Patterson’s swaggering surf rock riff, alongside Vaziri and Wilson’s playful stop-start antics, the track tells the story of occultist punks in “black jeans and the black t-shirts,” casting spells and bucking the man by harnessing the power “decades of sweat from punks unheard.”

It may feel a little goofy when stacked against Coliseum’s previous hardcore vitriol and middle-finder screeds, but it’s got hooks for days, and the band sounds positively alive with every chugging bar.

While Coliseum would ultimately go on to release their final LP, the pop-inflected Anxiety’s Kiss, in 2015 before quietly disbanding two years later (Patterson would go on to complete his artistic transformation with post-punk venture Fotocrime), Sister Faith remains the high water mark for a band that dared to be noisy, fearless, and vulnerable—often all at once.

As Baroness frontman John Dyer Baizley put it on their Bandcamp profile:

“Musical progression tends to come at the expense of quality or ethics, and Coliseum have sacrificed neither. Songwriting and emotional content have become their focus, and to that end they have gracefully transitioned from the unrelenting anger, rage, and rawness of youth to a more thought-provoking, yet no-less-powerful or insightful sound that is entirely their own.”

Whether you call it punk, indie, or something else entirely, Sister Faith remains a powerful testament to the spirit of full-blown, unadulterated rock ‘n’ roll.

You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.

Artist: Pantera

Album: Far Beyond Driven

Release: March 22nd, 1994

Label: East West

Listen here: Spotify | YouTube

Like most influential heavy acts of the twentieth century, my relationship with Pantera has taken the form of a reverse chronology. By the time the Texan metal powerhouse had released their seminal albums—1990’s now-iconic Cowboys from Hell and its equally revered 1992 follow-up Vulgar Display of Power—I was only four years old. At this point in my existence, the heaviest thing I knew was the theme for Thomas The Tank Engine. (Still a total banger, by the way.)

I first came across the band through “Revolution Is My Name,” a single taken from the group’s ninth and final studio LP, Reinventing the Steel (2000), which was featured on a CD compilation for Channel V’s Heavy Shi[f]t program. While the track was undeniably heavy and anthemic in all the right places, it didn’t stick with me like other selections from big names like Slipknot, Fear Factory and Rob Zombie. Plus, at this post-Y2K point in history, the CD-ROM bonus content was far too exciting. (“Woah! 240p music videos AND a screensaver?!?”)

So, when the band officially broke up in 2003, and guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott was tragically shot and killed during a Damageplan show in 2004, any chance I had of catching on to Pantera as an active musical force was gone. The only option I had left was to work my way backwards. Which, coincidentally, is how I discovered the visceral, headbang glory of 1994’s Far Beyond Driven.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

Of all the details surrounding Pantera’s seventh studio album, my favourite trivia tidbit concerns the group’s eventual choice for the cover artwork.

Unlike the sepia-toned bar room shenanigans of Cowboys from Hell, or the nearly monochromatic fisticuff aggression of Vulgar Display of Power, the cover for Far Beyond Driven is bright and incisive. The neon x-ray colour palette immediately directs the eye and invites further interrogation; the image of a drill driving into a person’s skull perfectly matches Pantera’s sonic profile in the mid-90s: brutal, painful, and ruthlessly mechanical.

However, this iconic image was not the band’s first choice. As drummer Vincent “Vinnie” Paul Abbott told Vanyaland in 2014, the original artwork featured said drill going right into someone’s unfortunate posterior:

“The original thought was ‘metal up your ass,’ you know? And like you said, in 1994, heavy metal was uncool, and we wanted to be as metal as we could. The label agreed with us and then came back three days later and said, ‘Uhhh…we can’t get this into Walmart, Target and retail, and it’s gonna kill us.’ So we got back with the guy who did the artwork, Dean Karr, and he did the one with the drill in the head, which signifies the same thing.”

Now, while I wholeheartedly agree with Paul’s sentiment here, I do think the label’s better judgment won out. On release, Far Beyond Driven debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, quickly becoming the group’s fastest-selling album and their second consecutive platinum release. The album was wildly successful and not only cemented Pantera’s status as heavy metal legends—it made them a household name. I’m not sure if the literal imagery of “metal up your ass” would have had the same knock-on effect.

That said, the band’s eventual choice of cover indicates a facet of the album that I feel is often overlooked. Despite the undeniable brutality on display, there’s a troubled, meditative core beneath the macho posturing, lizard-brain riffs, and furious assaults that warrants further scrutiny.

In the weeks before the album’s release, “I’m Broken” was released as the lead single. Perhaps more than any other track in the band’s hefty back catalogue—excepting absolute monsters like “Domination” and “Walk”—this song is pure, unadulterated Pantera.

Each musical element announces itself like sonic DNA: frontman Phil Anselmo’s stop-start verse flow, effortlessly transitioning guttural roars into righteous rebel yells; Dimebag’s blues-inflected riffage, pairing indomitable crunch and gain with neck-breaking swing and irresistible groove; Paul and bassist Rex Brown locking together to form an unstoppable rhythmic steamroller. (Fun fact: I cannot listen to this song without immediately thinking of this video. I feel no shame, and I make no apologies for it.)

As Anselmo explained to Rolling Stone in 2014 for the record’s 20th-anniversary milestone, the band were listening to The Melvins and Black Sabbath (yes, that is a “Planet Caravan” cover in the tracklist), so their natural inclination when moving into LP #7 was to slow things down, focusing on composition over instrumental flash and needless complexity. And with their earlier sound transitioning from glam metal to thrash and proto-death metal, Far Beyond Driven would further solidify Pantera’s approach to intense, headbang-focused groove metal.

Lyrically, however, “I’m Broken” is one of many tracks on the record that functioned as an emotional bloodletting for Anselmo, reflecting the frontman’s newfound vulnerability and self-awareness in the face of the group’s growing profile, touring commitments, and mounting substance abuse issues.

Speaking with Loudwire, Anselmo describes how “Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks” foreshadowed his fear of change in the face of addiction, where the threat of death hung over him like a “chokehold”. The track’s lengthy seven-minute runtime and Dimebag’s melancholic guitar wail mirror Anselmo’s inner darkness and torment, intensifying existential dread with brutal bursts of heavy metal fury. Likewise, the midsection of “Shedding Skin” drops into a clean melodic section contrasted against spoken word vocals, as Anselmo denies himself affection and desire in the face of self-loathing and destruction.

Alongside the more immediate and detrimental effects of a hard-rockin’ lifestyle, Far Beyond Driven also saw Anselmo reflecting on familial ties and his predilection for white-hot flashes of anger. Album opener “Strength Beyond Strength” is a classic example of a “puffing the chest up” macho rager. The track launches into a quick tempo metal meltdown, with lightning riffage from Dimebag, pummeling percussion from Paul, and Anselmo’s charged lyrical barbs against modern society’s definition of ‘success’ at the End of History:

“There is nothing/
No education, no family life to open my arms.
You'd say that my job is today/
Yet gone, tomorrow I'll be broke in a gutter.

I know the opinion/
A broken record.
Fuck you and your college dream/
Fact is we're stronger than all.”

And that’s just the first thirty seconds of the record—things only get more intense from there. “Use My Third Arm” is a self-described, wild “temper tantrum” that even Anselmo can’t pin down, unable to recall after thirty years just what exactly he was so pissed off about. But it works nonetheless, with Brown and Paul stomping away with almost robotic glee.

Elsewhere on the record, blood-pumpers like “25 Years” and “5 Minutes Alone” make things expressly personal. The former is a winding, serpentine exorcism through resentment and Anselmo’s looming daddy issues, while the latter acts as a middle-fingered retort to arrogant fans and wannabe tough guys.

Thankfully, however, Far Beyond Driven isn’t all dysfunctional family drama and attitudinal bluster. When the band come together for something heady and intricate, the results are often astounding.

“Slaughtered” takes aim at organized religion, with Anselmo’s “distorted” fusion of differing ideologies combining youthful hostility with social commentary. “Throes of Rejection” is borderline Sartrean in its analysis of sex as a bodily impulse and the rejection of self in the face of carnal desires. I’m not sure if Jean-Paul ever thought to pair the term “sugarhole” with a sliding, down-tuned beatdown, though… (maybe he should have).

Meanwhile, the screeching pick scrapes and factory floor percussive drops of “Becoming” undergird the track’s more subversive philosophical subtext. Reading Anselmo’s lyrics between each piercing solo and six-string squeal, one finds a reflection on Pantera’s existence as a whole—their rising popularity, the cultural context of the 90s, the evolving landscape of metal and alternative music—that morphs into a firm rejection of commodification for the temporary commercial aspirations of the peers (*cough* “Metallica” *cough*).

As Rolling Stone put it for their list of the “100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time,” in which Far Beyond Driven slots in at a well-deserving #39 (noticeably behind Vulgar Display of Power’s comfortable #10 position):

“To this day, Far Beyond Driven stands as indisputably the most extreme effort to have reached the top spot on the Billboard 200, not to mention to have debuted in that position upon its release. Credit the album’s success to Pantera’s undeniable dominance of the metal landscape in the mid-Nineties, as well as, in the words of [Anselmo], their commitment to making a ‘balls-out heavy-metal record with no compromising.’”

And truthfully, that central conceit is what makes the record such a lasting success and a high watermark for the band’s storied yet troubled career. It earned the band their first #1 album, a Grammy nomination, while also tackling personal and social issues with honesty and relatable grit. (Not to mention a couple of absolute banger riffs to boot.)

You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.

Artist: It Dies Today

Album: The Caitiff Choir

Release: September 21st, 2004

Label: Trustkill Records

Listen here: Spotify | YouTube

If there was a definitive tipping point for the metalcore, it would be the Year of Our Lord 2004.

With the second wave in full swing throughout the early years of the new millennium, this particular temporal convergence saw the release of several classic records from dedicated mainstays alongside early-career entries from future subgenre all-stars, including (but by no means limited to) Killswitch Engage’s The End of Heartache, Misery Signals’ Of Malice and the Magnum Heart, Atreyu’s The Curse, Eighteen Visions’ Obsession, Unearth’s The Oncoming Storm, Bury Your Dead’s Cover Your Tracks, Zao’s The Funeral of God, Parkway Drive’s Don’t Close Your Eyes, Caliban’s The Opposite From Within, and Bring Me The Horizon’s This Is What the Edge of Your Seat Was Made For.

However, one album that’s often rarely discussed in the ongoing conversation surrounding metalcore’s golden age is the Trustkill debut from Buffalo, New York’s second-favourite sons: The Caitiff Choir by It Dies Today.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

One possible reason for It Dies Today’s overlooked status in the greater chain of metalcore legacy acts has to do with location.

While the band formed in 2001 when most members were still in high school and had an average age of sixteen, the group spent their early years hitting the ground running. After dropping their three-track demo, Let the Angels Whisper Your Name followed by their Forever Scorned EP (2002) through Life Sentence Records, the young quintet managed to land some notable support slots and mini-tour runs with established heavy hitters like Between the Buried and Me and Alexisonfire.

And yet, within Buffalo, the band found often found themselves struggling to win over the hometown crowd, especially when the band’s origins coincided with the early rise of Buffalo’s O.G. hardcore heroes, Every Time I Die. As vocalist and frontman Nicholas Brooks told Punk Rock Interviews:

“Nobody goes over well in Buffalo. Basically, that’s still the case. The only band that does really well in Buffalo is Every Time I Die. They’re basically huge there, and every show they play there is sold out. Those guys are awesome. But our shows there are getting a little bit better because we got signed and stuff, but they’re still pretty weak.

[…]

Our hometown never really liked us, which was weird and kind of sucked. Like, we’d go 3000 miles away from home and play a ridiculously huge show, and then come home and play for 70 people or something. It’s weird.”

However, their collective fortunes would soon change for the better. Following a quick member shuffle, the band’s lineup coalesced around its predominant configuration—Brooks, guitarists Chris Cappelli and Mike Hatalak, drummer Nick Mirusso, with former guitarist Steve Lemke moving to bass—and they soon signed with independent label Trustkill Records, home to scene luminaries such as Throwdown, Eighteen Visions, and Bleeding Through.

In the lead-up to the release of their first full-length and Trustkill debut, the record’s lead single, “A Threnody for Modern Romance,” arrived with a bang.

While the track’s accompanying video (in all of its 240p glory) isn’t much to look at now eighteen years later, the track remains a succinct and satisfying introduction to the band’s sonic signature on The Caitiff Choir.

Furious double-kick bursts from Mirusso clear the path for Cappelli and Hatalak’s crunchy riffs, harmonised chugs, and tasteful melodic licks. It’s clear that the group know their way around a good hook, too, with Brooks providing a super sticky chorus to complement the savage ferocity of his hardcore bark.

Not ones to totally ignore the tried-and-true conventions of the subgenre, the band make full use of the track’s concise three-and-a-half-minute runtime, packing in a floor clearing breakdown (thickened up considerably by Lemke’s shuddering bottom-end), a cheeky glam-adjacent guitar solo, monstrous reverse snare hits, and the obligatory hand clap to gang vocal pivot in the bridge section.

While none of the elements above are necessarily revolutionary when considered in isolation, or even when judged by the standards of the subgenre for 2004, it’s their compositional and stellar execution that set It Dies Today apart from other bands of their ilk on The Caitiff Choir.

What makes the album truly stand out, at least for me, is its unabashed self-awareness, deliberately walking the very fine line between stylistic versatility, verbose melodrama, and ruthless, all-consuming cohesion.

Take songs like album opener “My Promise” or “The Depravity Waltz”. Both tracks are undeniably heavy, featuring crushing, destructive breakdown passages that wield thick, down-tuned guitars and demonic screams like glorious weapons of war.

Drawing influence from gothic poetry and Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Brooks screams passionately about “fear, loathing, resentment, and spite” on the former, before declaring “there is nothing pure in this world” on the latter, ending on a biblical call to wipe the Earth’s slate clean. It’s a song that’s all too fitting for the end of the world, and It Dies Today do their utmost to sound truly apocalyptic.

At the sonic level, these cuts combine the wrecking crew mentality of The Acacia Strain with the melodic accessibility of As I Lay Dying, and it’s a real testament to the group’s proficient songwriting that these reference points never feel overbearing or forced in any way. Similarly, more restrained, mid-tempo entries like “The Radiance” and “Marigold” still pack a hefty punch, dialling back on the intensity to let Brooks flex his clean pipes.

All of this is to say that, given their considerable talents, it’s a shame It Dies Today and The Caitiff Choir aren’t held in higher regard by metalcore’s senior-most evangelists. The album still feels fresh and invigorating close to two decades from its initial release, with stylistic hallmarks resonating across the subgenre throughout much of that time.

The album’s second single—the glorious, Myspace-aping “Severed Ties Yield Severed Heads”—has all the signifiers of a bonafide Atreyu hit, complete with runny mascara, all-black outfits, bass slide detonations, and harmonised cleans.

Meanwhile, “Freak Gasoline Fight Accident” (yes, that is a Zoolander reference) plays out like a map to the territory covered by acts like Memphis May Fire and Miss May I several years later, and album standout “Our Disintegration” has a chorus to closing half-time breakdown as outro that practically screams pre-Homesick A Day To Remember.

While It Dies Today would follow up the album with 2006’s well-received Sirens, and garner placement on a few blockbuster film soundtracks, the departure of Brooks a year later effectively derailed the band’s future momentum. I was never a big fan of the band’s Lividity-era material with Jason Wood (Kamilla, The Orphan) as replacement frontman, and even seeing them at Soundwave in 2010 didn’t come close to capturing the magic of their original LP.

After their breakup and hiatus in 2012, the band eventually reformed with their original line-up for The Caitiff Choir’s tenth anniversary in 2014, playing a handful of shows and even releasing a promising sample of new material. However, even that reunion was short-lived and it seems the band is now permanently shelved.

As much as they’re well-worn cliches, The Caitiff Choir was both ahead of its time and wholly representative of lightning in a bottle. There’s a passion and commitment captured on the record that’s impossible to fake, with a young band giving it their all and having nothing to prove. Nonetheless, despite its criminally underappreciated status, it remains a highly influential album for the metalcore subgenre.

You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.

Artist: At The Gates

Title: Slaughter of the Soul

Release: November 14th, 1995

Label: Earache Records

Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify

What does it mean to say that an album is a ‘classic’?

In tracking the evolution of musical subgenres, classic albums typically fall into two categories: simplification through stellar execution or subversion through unexpected experimentation. (Look, I know this sounds like another exercise in semantic pedantry, but stick with me here. I promise I’m going somewhere.)

Restricting our focus to the metal genre alone, numerous examples of critically acclaimed ‘classics’ present themselves: Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Slayer’s Reign in Blood for thrash; Death’s Scream Bloody Gore and Morbid Angel’s Altars of Madness for death metal; Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power and Sepultura’s Chaos A.D. for groove metal; etc.

However, in the case of melodic death metal, I think it’s difficult to overstate the impact of 1995’s Slaughter of the Soul, the fourth album from Swedish outfit At The Gates, as a true, bonafide classic. Let me tell you why.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

I first heard Slaughter of the Soul over a decade after its initial release and the band’s subsequent break-up.

I had a job in a metal dive bar in my post-high school haze of purposelessness, caught in that awkward transitional period between late teenage adolescence and young adulthood's burgeoning, aimless freedom. I was working as a ‘glassy’ in said dive bar (i.e. not quite a bartender but an all-around shitkicker), which doubled as a live music venue, and I became good friends with an older colleague named ‘Hoops’ who worked as the bar’s DJ.

Hoops was a biology lab technician by trade who had recently moved to Brisbane from Melbourne for unspecified reasons. He was friendly and sage in the way that most people in their 30s appear to be when you’re still seventeen. While Hoops was typically high during most if not all of our shifts, the only thing he loved more than weed was metal, and he took it upon himself to educate me on various records during our early morning drive home from work.

In September of 2006, Gothenburg's Dark Tranquillity played a nearly sold-out show at the bar as part of their Character (2005) album cycle. Before their set, I hadn’t heard the band, and my knowledge of European melodic death metal was extremely limited. However, the show was sick, and I was now very intrigued.

Expressing this fact to an incredulous Hoops on our drive home later that morning, he promptly flipped through his CD wallet—steering with one hand while also eating a bacon and egg McMuffin—before chucking a non-descript burnt CD in the car stereo. With glassy eyes and a smirk, he simply said, “Check this out,” and then hit play.

Slaughter of the Soul begins unassumingly—a wash of static noise, some atmospheric ambience, and the crashing of mechanistic clanging.

Over this distorted preamble, we hear vocalist and frontman Tomas ‘Tompa’ Lindberg’s soft-spoken words act as a thematic proclamation:

“We are blind to the world within us/ Waiting to be born.”

Then, the riffs hit, and album opener “Blinded By Fear” begins in earnest.

The track’s now-iconic lead riff, played with quicksilver dexterity by guitarist and principal songwriter Anders Björler, alongside the furious tempo shifts and rhythmic lock-step of drummer Adrian Erlandsson and bassist Jonas Björler (Anders’ twin brother), have made the spell-binding composition an iconic example of melodic death metal’s relentless pursuit of precise aggression.

Around the one minute mark, Lindberg’s harsh mid-range scream pierces through the crushing mix, mirroring the track’s eerie malevolence with poetic force and hellish visions:

“I cast aside my chains/
Fall from reality/
Purgatory unleashed/
Now burn the face of the earth.
Purgatory unleashed/
Now burn the face of the earth.”

Moving into an unsettling bridge at the two-minute mark, as Björler and rhythm guitarist Martin Larsson juxtapose ambient notes against Erlandsson's pummeling double-kick, the track launches into a blazing harmonised solo off the back of Lindberg’s demonic chorus shriek:

“The face of all your fears!”

As far as introductions go, it’s hard to top “Blinded By Fear.” The track is all killer with zero filler, packed full of engaging performances and punchy songwriting that announces the band, the album, and the subgenre with crystal-clear clarity.

But where to go from here? Delivering on this promise of precise aggression, the album’s title track begins with a buzzsaw riff progression and a five-count smackdown as a lead-in before Lindberg gives the final “Go!”-ahead like a dread-locked conductor.

Once again utilising relentless tempos, the track’s effortless sense of momentum is anchored by Larsson’s punishing downstrokes, with Björler finding space at the end of each riff progression for little harmonic licks and melodic touches. It’s enough to be catchy and instantly recognisable without sacrificing the band’s concerted sense of heaviness or compositional intricacy.

Much of Slaughter of the Soul operates within this zone: simplifying and strengthening the remit of melodic death metal through stellar execution and exceptional songwriting. As J. Bennett notes in a tenth-anniversary review of the record for Decibel:

“Unbeknownst to the band’s members—not to mention heshers, headbangers and moustache warriors worldwide—it would become the most influential death metal album of the next decade…

Vocalist Tomas Lindberg’s immortal command—“Go!”—in the opening seconds of Slaughter’s title track had become the war cry for a generation of future hardcore heroes and metal mercenaries.”

Recorded at the hallowed Studio Fredman and overseen by co-producer Fredrik Nordström (Dream Evil, Dimmu Borgir, Opeth), Slaughter of the Soul is considered one of the defining releases of melodic death metal, alongside The Jester Race (1996) by In Flames and The Gallery (1995) by Dark Tranquillity.

Given the convergence of all three acts in Sweden’s 90s death metal scene and Nordström’s role as engineer and producer for all three records, this combination of principal actors is now considered an essential attribute of the famed “Gothenburg Sound.”

For At The Gates, the album cohered at just the right time. The band had already released several albums and EPs (including 1992’s The Red in the Sky Is Ours and 1994’s Terminal Spirit Disease), and their recent signing with Earache Records allowed them to benefit from a label with real financial support and backing. As Lindberg told Revolver:

“When Earache came along, it was like being saved! They already had a good reputation for signing classic death metal [Napalm Death, Carcass, and Morbid Angel, among others], so we felt right at home.”

The quintet now had a lot to prove with their increased profile, and this heightened visibility is felt directly in the album’s breakneck performances.

Following the departure of guitarist Alf Svensson after 1993's With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness, Björler’s songwriting efforts primarily focused on streamlining the band’s already potent sound, refining riffs to their barest elements and ensuring the production emphasised both the clarity and precision of their formidable rhythmic tumults.

As Nordström recalls in a 25th-anniversary piece for Blunt, the band were all too eager to push themselves to the limit—sometimes even to a fault:

“I remember Jonas, one of the brothers, he was pushing his brother so hard. He was sitting there complaining, more or less, at him for the whole guitar tracking. So when it was time to bass, he was exhausted. He didn’t have any energy left for doing bass. So the bass is kind of sloppily played on that album. That’s why you don’t hear the bass, except for one part. You never really think about it, but there is more or less no bass on that album. The bass is there, but it’s very low frequency. He is a good bass player, but I think he was just exhausted.”

Absence of bass tone aside, Slaughter of the Soul still yields many memorable moments: a deadly sample nod to director Quentin Tarantino’s classic film Reservoir Dogs on the full-throttle “Suicide Nation”; the irresistible hooks of “Under A Serpent Sun” and “Nausea”; a spectacular guest solo from King Diamond’s Andy LaRocque on album standout “Cold"; and the triumphant, darkly suggestive instrumental closer “The Flames of the End.”

Returning to the original question posed at the beginning, what makes Slaughter of the Soul a classic? Arguably it’s the fact that much of what melodic death metal is today can be traced back to this one album.

There’s an undeniable lineage and legacy at play here, one that’s firmly imprinted in the DNA of groups found both within and outside the subgenre, including (but certainly not limited to) fellow European contemporaries like Arch Enemy and Soilwork, ‘New Wave of American Heavy Metal’ flagbearers like Killswitch Engage, All That Remains, Darkest Hour, Shadows Fall, The Black Dahlia Murder, and God Forbid, alongside several prominent metalcore stars of British (Bring Me The Horizon, Architects) and Australian (I Killed The Prom Queen, Confession, Buried in Verona) origin.

Slaughter of the Soul is a bonafide classic because the album’s sonic signature, longevity, and commercial success helped to define melodic death metal’s boundaries and stylistic attributes. Further, it has a musical essence that manages to transcend both categorisation and temporal specificity.

Since At The Gates reunited in 2010 and released three more albums—At War with Reality (2014), To Drink from the Night Itself (2018) and The Nightmare of Being (2021)—the band is often asked about the continuing relevance of Slaughter of the Soul on metal as a genre more broadly.

Comparing their achievements to Big Four giants Slayer (not a totally unwarranted comparison, in my humble opinion), Lindberg makes a convincing case for the album in the wider pantheon of melodic death metal:

“We owe a lot to that record and that part of our career. But we can also, as musicians and songwriters, see that as an isolated moment. That's what we sounded like then; that was our goal then: to make that precise aggressive piece of music. And now we're focused on this. And next time — cause we're always trying to be true to what we do at a certain time — that's exactly who we'll be then.”

You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.

Artist: Killing The Dream

Title: In Place Apart

Release: September 13th, 2005

Label: Deathwish, Inc.

Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify

The live music experience has been a huge element of my life for over seventeen years—almost half my time spent on this godforsaken planet.

I’ve been to so many hardcore shows, basement matinees, metal gigs, and multi-day festival line-ups that it’s quite literally impossible for me to recount them all. I’ve seen frostbitten black thrash in Oslo, frenzied cosplay punk in Osaka, endless conveyor belts of stage dives at This Is Hardcore fest in Philadelphia and a host of intimate performances at venues around Australia.

Yet one of my greatest musical regrets is never having the chance to see Killing The Dream. The Sacramento hardcore outfit were active from 2002 to 2011, throughout much of my adolescence and early adulthood, releasing three full-length albums alongside early EPs and compilations. Although the group never made it Down Under, the stars also never truly aligned in such a way that my international travel plans synced up with their hectic touring schedule.

And while I’ve had a decade to make peace with this fact, every time I listen to the band’s phenomenal debut album, In Place Apart (2005), I’m still flooded with the all-too-familiar pangs of bittersweet melancholy. Let me tell you why.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

In late 2006, I was eighteen years old and completely directionless. After structuring much of my high school studies around STEM subjects and wanting to pursue a career in the Australian Defense Force (lol), I had an extremely early life crisis and ultimately deferred university for several years, taking up the opportunity to work shitty bar jobs instead and get blackout drunk four nights a week.

It was at one of these shitty jobs where I accidentally fell into the role of being a “DJ” for a nightclub’s Friday band rotation. I use the scare quotes here for DJ because—and I cannot stress this enough—I had absolutely no idea what I was doing in any meaningful professional capacity.

I was a glorified jukebox or curated human playlist from a pre-streaming era, hitting the play button on Pioneer CDJ-1000s for no other reason than my own personal taste and satisfaction. Audience and club patrons be damned. But it was also a job that allowed me to carry a milk crate full of booze into a poorly lit DJ booth and empty it at my leisure, so there’s that. (Noticing a theme here?)

Each week, various promoters would leave behind copies of new releases from artists on their roster and other labels with distribution, and I would make a cursory pass through these records to see if anything new was worth my attention. It’s here that I first came across Killing The Dream and In Place Apart.

“Rough Draft (An Explanation),” the opening track of In Place Apart, serves a two-fold purpose. It acts as an introduction to the band’s impassioned take on the melodic hardcore sound, while also delivering a thematic mission statement of sorts.

Droning guitars from Bart Mullis eventually give way to an avalanche of drums and Christopher Chase’s humming bass thrum, striking the perfect balance between urgency and tension.

At the midway point, over Isaac Fratini’s rapid-fire snare roll, vocalist and frontman Elijah Horner erupts into being, his fierce, larynx-shredding scream seemingly powered by raw intensity and narrative sincerity. Cavernous gang vocals sing back the track’s closing line, evoking the communal free-for-all of a hardcore show.

And in just under two minutes, Killing The Dream manage to prime the listener for the complete sonic experience contained within their album debut:

“Where do you go when everything you know is wrong/

If you know anything at all?

Tomorrow always starts so bright, before it fades/

And all the empty faces, they all turn again.

When the lights are off, we’re all just dead again.

Kill the lights, kill the pain.”

Recorded with Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou (Champion, The Hope Conspiracy) and featuring Deathwish, Inc. label figure-head Jacob Bannon’s iconic cover art style, In Place Apart had all the sonic and aesthetic signifiers necessary to become a bonafide hardcore classic.

And while the album might not be revered on the same level as other influential melodic hardcore staples—like Modern Life Is War’s Witness (2005) or Have Heart’s Songs to Scream at the Sun (2008)—its place as a crucial gateway record for me is undeniable.

Without In Place Apart, I wouldn’t have found bands like The Carrier, Verse, Bane, Sinking Ships, Guns Up!, Ruiner, This Is Hell, Go It Aone, Paint It Black, and many more. It’s one of the formative records in my overall musical journey and each listen still brings back that initial rush of excitement and discovery.

Despite whipping through twelve tracks in a hurried 25 minutes, three specific songs stand out for me as being representative of In Place Apart as a whole. First up is a fan favourite, “We’re All Dead Ends”:

“Sing!!” pleads a shrieking Horner, emphasising the phenomenological tug-of-war at the heart of hardcore, a genre that often relies too strongly on formalism and familiarity at the sake of the new and dangerous.

The droning guitar lead-drum roll combo returns once more, quickly followed by arresting verses that bristle with aggression courtesy of Mullis’ furious chord progressions and Fratini’s pounding kit work.

However, it’s the track’s mid-section that yields the real gold here, with a sudden stop-start fight riff that rushes into a massive breakdown section filled with Horner’s withering lyrical reflections:

“We’re all fucked, so fuck it all.

There’s nothing we can do.”

There’s a simplicity inherent to this call-and-response phrase that makes it perfect for a sweaty crowd of angsty adults to sing along, yet it’s also a lyric that’s been stuck in my head for years due to its philosophical profundity.

See, there’s nothing more attractive to youth than the reckless abandon of nihilism. Adult life is way too busy and complicated and hard, so having a worldview that takes all of that complexity, absurdity and lack of meaning, only to summarily reject it in one swift cathartic embrace is utterly intoxicating.

And yet, the older I get (while also withholding any claims to wisdom gained), the easier it is for me to acknowledge how impactful this message is despite its lack of philosophical nuance. And to some degree, I think Horner recognised this within his own lyricism, as the track’s verse directly counters the seductive impulse of the beatdown’s nihilism:

“Sometimes it just seems we’re the ones who hope forgot/

But sometimes, it seems we’re the ones who forgot to hope/

And you’re feeling it again.”

For the nihilist, hope is futile. But for the dreamer, it’s fundamental. The key to moving on and passing through it is acceptance and self-awareness.

After smashing through some shorter, more aggressive numbers, In Place Apart arrives at Side-B standout “Sick Of Sleeping”:

As a writer, I return to this track a lot. And as my writing has developed and improved over time, forming more and more of my life and career, the track’s resonance only continues to grow stronger and more resilient.

Mullis’ angular riffs clash up against Farinti’s effortless fills and tom roll cavalcades, as Horner blasts through a furious screed about insecurity, impostor syndrome, and the inevitability of failure:

“I tried to write... this is all I got.

I tried to sing, but this is how it sounds.

Every thought, every word, everything I don’t deserve.

I’ve held your hand, I’ve weighed you down for far too long now/

And I’m falling again.”

Transitioning into another crunchy beat-down section, Mullis puts the melody in melodic hardcore with a beautiful yearning lead that lifts the track both sonically and thematically, all before everything dissipates and crumbles just as quickly as it coalesced.

Horner closes the track with a pained, isolated scream that repeats the words “I’m sorry” over and over again. It’s a raw, powerful moment on the record, and it never fails to give me goosebumps.

Now we reach the record’s penultimate track, the transcendent “39th and Glisan”:

After digressions through cynicism and insecurity, pessimism and failure, Killing The Dream deliver one of the most uplifting and empowering moments on the entire album, In Place Apart’s true anthem and an ode to grim determination in spite of life’s hurdles.

Here, Horner reflects on trials and tribulations, using the sting of loss and lament as fuel for a relentless burning optimism:

“We owe them nothing, but we’ll never get away.

So we’ll pay our debt with blood and sweat from these moments/

Just words and the hearts where they were born.

Our pockets are as empty as our heads/

And that’s just how it should be.

We’re sick and we’re tired but we’re finally happy.

Sometimes all it takes to find a home is to leave.

And a thousand miles is all it took this time.

We’ve lost it all but what matters is tonight, tomorrow the same.”

For a young kid staring down the path of corporate wage-slavery and rampant materialism, this message hit me like a lightning bolt.

Suddenly, this thing with music and hardcore and friends and having fun all made sense. It wasn’t just pointless escapism, it was an affirmation of the things that really matter, and the things in life that we should cherish and nurture.

It’s hard to pin down exactly, but there’s something about the instrumental cohesion in the track’s finale, with its deafening chorus of gang vocals and galvanized riff from Mullis, that turns a surface-level hardcore punk closer into a generational siren song. Representative of In Place Apart as a whole, it’s a shining example of melodic hardcore at its finest and why Killing The Dream deserve more recognition within the subgenre.

Along with the band’s efforts on their follow-up LPs—Fractures (2008) and Lucky Me (2010)—future acts like Touche Amore, Defeater, and others would eventually take this blueprint and refine it further still, distilling this potent blend of poetic emotion and clench-fisted energy for years to come.

You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.

Artist: The Afghan Whigs

Title: Black Love

Release: March 12th, 1996

Label: Elektra Records

Listen here: Spotify | Youtube

I still remember where I was when I heard this collection of songs for the first time. It’s a locus of discovery forever etched into my brainpan with the rough, raised edges of a permanent cigarette burn.

I was home alone and sitting at my desk, pretending to work a job that I didn’t even remotely care about, one that I would soon leave with the reckless abandon of a flippant afterthought. If I were to take retroactive stock of my mental state at that moment, I was likely emotionally unfulfilled and (at least unconsciously) despondent. Music was my daily escape and I was willing to drift, both literally and figuratively, wherever it would take me.

In terms of my career and sense of personal accomplishment, I was feeling existentially cornered and creatively stifled. I was looking for a way out, a trajectory of radical change, and I was becoming increasingly frustrated at coming up short. Then, one day, a little rock album from the ‘90s made its way into my shuffle queue and the spark I was looking for went off in my brain like a gunshot. This is a story about Black Love.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

In an interview with Stereogum, Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli was asked whether there’s a sense of weirdness inherent in the act of listening to the songs he wrote for his previous records, and if there’s a connection between who he was then and the person listening to those songs in the here and now. Dulli’s answer is, unsurprisingly, quite illuminating in its universality:

“It’s different versions of yourself. It’s sort of like looking at photographs of yourself through time like, ‘Wow, did I wear that? Did my hair really look like that?’ It’s whoever you are at a given moment. And the great thing about songs for me is they remind me of times of my life. I can instantly remember experiences, sights, sounds, smells even. It’s a cool trigger to have. It’s a roadmap to my life, especially my life from nineteen on, so… good, bad, ugly, embarrassing, extraordinary, and everything in between.”

When Black Love, the Cincinnati alt-rock outfit’s fifth album was released in early 1996, I was only seven years old. I wouldn’t encounter the album, or the band more generally, until twenty years later at the beginning of 2016, as the record approached its highly-anticipated twentieth-anniversary release. Now, let me tell you, there’s a hell of a lot of “experiences, sights, [and] sounds” going on between seven and twenty-seven. Nonetheless, for me, like Dulli, Black Love remains a phenomenological trigger—and an irrevocably cool one at that.

Turning to questions of fan appreciation of his work with The Afghan Whigs, and how Black Love’s predecessor, Gentlemen (1993), is often heralded as the band’s crowning achievement, Dulli admits that preference plays just as much a part for the artist as it does for the listener:

“That we put something out [Gentlemen] that captured the zeitgeist of a certain moment, that’s fantastic, you know what I mean? That’s lightning in a bottle. But I look at it this way: Thriller may have been Michael Jackson’s most popular album, but it was not my favorite. Things have a way of working themselves out…. I like Achtung Baby better than The Joshua Tree, and that’s not a put-down to The Joshua Tree, it’s just a preference. That’s the cool thing about having a body of work. People have stuff to talk about, lists to make.”

I couldn’t agree more. And in terms of my own personal roadmap, Black Love is far more formative and essential than anything on Gentlemen. So, in keeping with that spirit, I will endeavour to walk us through my experience with Black Love: from the front to back, beginning to end, and everything in between, each track ranked in order of impact and lasting resonance.

11) “Faded”

As the legend goes, Dulli originally conceived of the Black Love narrative as a film noir screenplay. As Joseph Schafer notes for Stereogum:

“After Gentlemen's success, Dulli leveraged his cultural currency toward Hollywood, scoring the soundtrack to Ted Demme's film Beautiful Girls and nabbing a cameo for the Afghan Whigs, performing a cover of “Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe” on screen. Dulli planned to write, direct, and score his own noir movie, a project that never materialized, but the material intended for the soundtrack went on to become Black Love.”

Like all good albums, “Faded” brings the thematic journey full circle. With the sounds of a man at a metaphysical crossroads, trains glide over steel tracks in the dead of night against haunting and cathartic notes of piano, organ and cello on the album’s melancholic closing track.

John Curley’s wandering bassline and guitarist Rick McCollum’s wahhh’d-out licks add vibrancy to Dulli’s narrative soul-searching: “Lord, lift me out of the night/ Come on, look down/ And see the mess I’m in tonight.”

10) “Night By Candlelight”

Here, the Whigs strip things right back. A simple finger-plucked refrain from McCollum backs up Dulli’s plaintive vocal with an assist from Twilight Singers alum Shawn Smith, as various ensemble instruments—hammered dulcimer, timpani, cello—eventually slide into the mix, bolstering the track’s dramatic range. When things finally coalesce and break open at the end, the track morphs into a sweeping grand ballad that sounds like a tear-jerking church vigil.

9) “Step Into The Light”

After the album’s first third, this track arrives as a much-needed palate cleanser. It's a sweet ballad with delicate hints of country twang. McCollum’s subtle pedal steel accents and Dulli’s additional percussion add rich layers of emotional texture. There’s a deep sense of lyrical yearning going on here and Dulli’s raw vulnerability makes it palpable.

8) “Crime Scene Part One”

This is where it all begins. Given the album’s cinematic origins, the “Scene” of the title is two-fold, crossing diegetic boundaries from the story being told to the real, physical album being played. Train tracks clang in the distance as our protagonist contemplates suicide, hesitating on the edge of oblivion. It’s a real bummer right off the bat, but Dulli knows that when people are this low, that’s when you see what they’re really made of.

Like a great novel or classic film, the opening line is key here too: “Tonight, tonight, I say goodbye/ To everyone who loves me/ Stick it to my enemies tonight/ Then I disappear.” Farewell, devotion, revenge, and absence—it’s all there; the hallmarks of a good story. The mid-section pre-chorus jump builds tension for Dulli’s hook, sinking its teeth into the listener and demanding attention.

7) “Summer’s Kiss”

The more captivating of the album’s traditional ballads, “Summer’s Kiss” starts off with a build-up before drummer Paul Buchignani leads Dulli and McCollum into a full-blown, wall of sound, chord progression. The composition is stripped back and plain, without the additional instrumentation and add-ons adorning the other songs. It’s the most ‘traditional’ Whigs song on the record and, sequenced between the immaculate “Bulletproof” and “Faded,” it helps to bring Black Love’s closing triumvirate to a satisfying and cathartic conclusion.

6) “Honky’s Ladder”

This is Dulli at his most cinematic, a born storyteller and consummate showman. The verse’s noir-influenced lyrics are whipcrack smart and witty, bleeding into a lofty and arresting chorus hook that links back to the narrative pit of despair introduced with Black Love’s protagonist in “Crime Scene Part One.” The track also has a hypnotic lock-step groove with plenty of swing to it, making it one of the more playful tracks on the record. Weird choice for the lead single, though.

5) “Going To Town”

Just a sick mid-tempo foot-stomper. This one always reminds me of an HBO intro theme, like something you’d expect to hear over a credit sequence of highways, old school cars, and washed out city streets on The Sopranos or True Detective/Blood. The addition of clavinet and cello gives the composition a grand theatrical register, which is definitely in keeping with Dulli's cinematic aspirations.

4) “Double Day”

God, I love the bassline thrum on this one. So, so smooth. Combined with Dulli’s swagger on the verse (“drunk with love and other things”), there are layers of seduction and hedonism to his inflection that I’m still trying to parse. (“Get it on,” indeed.) Oh, when Dulli puts some grit into that chorus with backing vocals from Barbara Hunter and Doug Falsetti and just belts out that high croon? Incredible stuff.

3) “My Enemy”

That opening guitar riff from McCollum is iconic. Every time I hear it, it puts this big dumb smile on my face. Just pure rock ‘n’ roll greatness; an absolute stomper right from the get-go.

This track also has some of Dulli’s best lyrical gems—“I hear the whispers, baby/ If what they say is true/ They say I killed the brother/ To fall in love with you” and “These words, I heard them once before/A conversation I believe/ How does a man begin to fall/ When he does practice to deceive?”—that ooze charisma with every primal growl, feeling perfectly matched to the song’s aggressive tempo and swift transitions.

2) “Blame, Etc.”

You know a song is gonna be great when it starts with a big ol’ masculine purr. “Blame, Etc.” is just a straight-up vibe, with Dulli channelling his love for R’n’B, soul, and funk, adding hefty doses of NOLA big-band energy to the band’s sturdy alt-rock foundations.

It’s the type of track you can imagine playing over a hazy saloon, filled with clouds of smoke, sticky floors, questionable characters, and a scuffed up bar in peril of running dry far too soon. Pair this with a monster chorus and Dulli’s sexually-charged existentialism, and you’ve got one of the best Whigs tracks ever recorded and Black Love’s title track—albeit sans the actual title. As Schafer puts it:

“The song was intended as a tribute to the late Temptations singer David Ruffin, whose infidelities become an ideal vehicle for the nastiness Dulli had been writing around since 1991. In many ways, the song is the centerpiece of Black Love—the words of its chorus show up in “Crime Scene Part One,” and, crudely, the co-opting of African American music idioms is as central a theme in the record as film noir and sexual deprivation are—hence the title.”

1) “Bulletproof”

With bursts of organ and clean, straightforward riff progression from McCollum, we arrive at Black Love’s opus, the impeccable “Bulletproof.”

Here, Dulli explores the tension between a love song and singing about love, through love and to love itself. The track is littered with allusions to dreams and phantasms, midnight congress, truth and lies, fatal attractions, and the gut-wrenching ache of loss. And it all turns on Dulli’s powerful chorus, easily one of the best he’s ever penned:

“Every time I dream about you, baby/
With your hands all over me.
I never forget anything/
Don’t forget that I’m asleep.”

On each listen, there’s a moment in the last third outro where Dulli’s croon wavers ever so slightly and then finally breaks into this heartbreaking roar over never letting go, his voice quaking with forlorn resignation and bristling against Chichester’s bright organ and striking piano notes, and it gives me goosebumps every single time.

It’s just… beautiful. Goddammit. “Here we go.”

You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.

Artist: He Is Legend

Title: Suck Out The Poison

Release: October 3rd, 2006

Label: Solid State Records/Century Media Records

Listen here: Spotify | Youtube

Like most subgenre descriptors born of the Internet and/or lazy music journalism, ‘Southern metalcore’ is admittedly a bit of a head-scratcher. While the term has ostensibly come to represent metalcore acts with a stylistic flair for incorporating the ‘Southern rock’-isms of the American South—that is, disparate elements of hard rock (or ‘butt rock’ to its detractors), country, sludge, psych and folk—it’s not exactly a geographically consistent moniker.

For one thing, one of the subgenre’s longstanding trailblazers, Every Time I Die (RIP), are from the cold winter clime of Buffalo, New York. To me (an Aussie), that’s practically Canadian. Better still, acts like Dead and Divine and Cancer Bats are actually Canadian, Vanna originated in Massachusetts, and Australia’s own regional scene has had more than a few earnest wannabes.

Thankfully, there’s one band of this ilk that’s managed to rise above such labels by fully embodying their Southern roots and daring to reach new creative heights in the process. And that band is Wilmington, North Carolina’s very own He Is Legend.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

Suck Out The Poison, the band’s 2006 sophomore record, wastes little time in letting the listener know what’s up.

“Dixie Wolf (The Seduction Of...)” kicks off with drummer Steve Bache’s punchy rhythms and the down-tuned, twin-guitar twang of guitarists Adam Tanbouz and McKenzie Bell. As the furious riff progression hits a stop, Matty Williams fills the track’s dynamic range with a thick, rumbling bass tone before vocalist and frontman Schuylar (that’s ‘SKY-LAR’) Croom’s gravelly croon rolls seductively into the first verse:

“I thought you knew me but it seems you never did/
I tried to find you in the castle where you hid.
I took the pictures that you ruined from my wall/
No one remembered me I was right after all.”

With this subtle nod to ruinous magic realism, the track launches into a triumphant chorus section dressed up by Tanbouz’s playful leads. As Croom sings of villains and princesses, calling out the fairy tale by the name itself, his vocal performance suddenly turns on a dime and his monstrous side is revealed with a powerful guttural scream: “Rest in pieces!” For 2006, this was the He Is Legend fans knew and loved—almost. Well, not quite.

Suck Out The Poison would end up being the first of many ambitious sonic departures for the group across their near-twenty-year career, as they faithfully embraced a more dynamic and versatile sound steeped in hard rock lore and gothic trappings.

In the music business, change isn’t an option—it’s a fact of life. The mid-00s were no different, representing a formative period of significant upheaval for groups coming out of their previously insular and now burgeoning mainstream scenes. More eyeballs meant new expectations and more pressure to perform. So, how did He Is Legend approach this shift? Well, short answer: they didn’t. Not consciously anyway.

“There was no decision,” Croom says in a 2007 interview with Death Before Dishonour magazine. “Our sound has always changed from album to album. This is just the first time we didn’t change the name of the band with the sound change.”

It’s this sense of confidence and fluidity in their own skin that lends He Is Legend their dynamic edge. While early releases like the 91025 EP and their debut album I Am Hollywood sported brutal screams and superfluous breakdowns, there was always a strong melodic undercurrent to the band’s compositions.

Although many of the bands they toured with in the metalcore/post-hardcore hey-day of the mid-00s only played at doing a ‘rock album’ or an off-kilter stylistic shift, He Is Legend never had to fight that urge because it was already sewn into the fabric of their sonic DNA. They weathered the fairweather seasonal winds by doing what they do best: whatever the fuck they want. Croom continues:

“I guess that is what we pride ourselves on: we are a kick-ass live band and we do what we do to the best of our ability. Of course, we get lumped into the hardcore scene a lot because our music is heavy, and because of the record label that we’re on, but we look at ourselves as more of a rock ‘n’ roll band.”

Tracks like the swirling “Mushroom River,” “China White II” and the record’s quicksilver title track showcase this traditional rock ‘n’ roll tendency in real-time. Croom’s vocal performance effortlessly flits from slippery to savage, accenting Tanbouz’s solos and the group’s rhythmic lock-step with his lofty high notes and layered demonic shrieks.

Find another band of the time that could write a breakdown section as concussive and captivating as the “Little pig, little pig” refrain in the stomping “Serpent Sickness,” or weave an epic story of witchy resurrection into a full-blown Southern gothic barnburner like “Electronic Throat.”

For Croom, who grew up in a rigid Baptist household where signs of horror, terror and the occult were strictly off-limits, Suck Out The Poison was both an act of defiance and divination; a way to suck out the poison from our cultural consciousness before spitting back it out over delightfully dark and entrancing compositions.

As the frontman describes in the band’s now-archived Solid State Records bio:

“The world that exists on the road is as real as anything in my imagination. What’s the difference between a story about a man living inside a woman’s head and the fleeting events of everyday life on tour? The visions I see in these songs are pictures of my home—the road. Losing all you know of comfort and reality is what this record is about.

It’s not just a collection of songs, but a visit to my abode, my dwelling place. And in that dwelling place, you may find a man with flowers growing out of his hands, or you might find a widow mourning the loss of her sailor husband—who has just been devoured by a whale while at sea. Whether it’s a witch who stole the moon or a wife that was made from a corpse, every song is a methodical, magical, mystical masterpiece.”

Album deep cut (and my own personal favourite) “The Widow Of Magnolia” channels Croom’s siren song into a masterclass of weaponised aggression and narrative storytelling.

With a crunchy, straight-forward intro, the track quickly charges into kinetic verses, amply directed by Tanbouz and Bell’s thick-and-fast fretwork. Croom’s chorus turns on aching loss and preemptive mourning (“Magnolia/ I’ll be coming home/ I’ll be coming home/ Real soon”), describing a lament for someone the narrator desperately wishes to see again.

However, all hope is quickly dashed, as the intro breakdown returns once more, but this time it’s slower, heavier, and all the more crushing, imposing itself upon the listener like the angry face of a 100-year wave. Against the track’s hypnotic tidal pull, the listener is marooned and hopeless. Sucked into the fading notes of the band’s sonic squall, where we all await the bitter solitude of a sailor’s grave.

While Bell would eventually leave the band shortly after the release of Suck Out The Poison (and sadly pass away in 2020; RIP), the creative core of the group—Croom, Tanbouz and Williams—have always maintained a distinct and pronounced consistency in their approach to songwriting, something which has garnered them a passionate and devoted fanbase (myself included). As Croom explained in our 2017 interview:

“We certainly have a cult following. Of course, we didn’t sell out this room in Glasgow tonight, but the kids that were here were fucking stoked, you know? So, to us, it’s really important to notice that silver lining. … [W]e’re coming up on this new movement of our band, gaining new fans and it’s important for us to remain positive throughout this whole thing. Ultimately, we owe it to these influences that shine through regardless, and I think our sound now is nailed down and pinpointed.”

In looking back at the He Is Legend catalogue, it’s remarkable just how diverse the band’s sound has become over two decades. Whether it’s the spasmodic, art-rock flirtations of I Hate You (2009), the towering melodies of the massively underrated Heavy Fruit (2014), or their career-best performance on the super catchy White Bat (2019).

As I wrote in my review for the band’s 2017 album, few, it’s this fearless creative vision that has led to He Is Legend being well-respected within the heavy music community. In a feature for Alternative Press, Underoath vocalist Spencer Chamberlain remarked:

“There’s a handful of bands out there, that when I hear their record, I wish that I wrote it… He Is Legend have always been one of those bands.”

You can now find all of the albums featured in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist on Spotify.

Artist: Bury Your Dead

Title: Bury Your Dead

Release: March 18th, 2008

Label: Victory Records

Listen here: Spotify | Youtube

In my review of Birmingham progressive metalcore outfit ERRA’s latest record (it’s really good, check it out), I mapped out my feelings on why certain bands choose to go down the “self-titled” route when naming a new album:

“Self-titled records typically serve as cautionary artifacts in the realm of heavy music. In most cases, they act as a form of introduction—the defining statement for a young group at the beginning of their burgeoning career, loudly declaring themselves to the world: ‘This is who we are, and this is what we do.’

Alternatively, the eponymous album might also serve as a form of course correction for an established outfit, either reaffirming their chosen genre and sonic wheelhouse or representing an artistic pivot and fork in the musical road.”

For Boston bruisers Bury Your Dead, the release of their self-titled fourth LP in 2008 is very much a case of the latter. This desire to gently pivot and retool their heavy beatdown sound, in light of an endless cavalcade of member exits and line-up changes, made for—in my humble opinion—their best album to date.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

Looking at the band’s Wikipedia page (yes, I am in fact a music journalist, thank you for asking), we can see how an album like Bury Your Dead might come into being. In the seven years between their founding and the release of their fourth LP in early 2008, the band had already gone through 18(!) members, three of which were vocalists and in the space of six months no less.

With the exit of long-time frontman Matt Bruso, who featured on 2004’s Cover Your Tracks, 2006’s Beauty and the Breakdown (an all-time excellent title for the genre), and was present for much of the band’s breakout in the early 2000s, Bury Your Dead turned to a left-of-centre source as his replacement: ex-I Killed The Prom Queen vocalist, Australian national, and all-round desmond, Michael Crafter.

This stint, however, was a short-lived one, with Crafter bailing on the band only months into his first US tour and promptly returning home for good. While it was certainly an oddity of scene gossip at the time, I do remember wondering what it would sound like to hear Crafter’s unique voice over the top of some pit-worthy mayhem and, thanks to the magical reach of YouTube, now we know:

With Crafter out of the picture, Bury Your Dead quickly found his semi-permanent replacement in former Cassius vocalist Myke Terry (now of Volumes), bringing us to the formidable line-up for the release of Bury Your Dead: Terry on lead vocals, guitarists Brendan “Slim” MacDonald and Eric Ellis, bassist Aaron “Bubble” Patrick, and drummer Mark Castillo.

Now for the confessional part of this retrospective: I fucking love this record. I listen to it at least once a month, and it has a very healthy rotation on my “PUNCH SHIT” workout playlist. It’s very, very sick. My reasoning for this adoration is two-fold. First, it’s eleven tracks done in a tight 33-minutes, offering up pretty much all killer with zero filler. And second, it’s the epitome of that age-old, PR yardstick “heavy but also melodic.”

Much like their peers in Killswitch Engage at the time, Bury Your Dead actually managed to do the damn thing on this record, cracking the cheat code for writing radio-friendly accessibility without sacrificing energy or their core sound.

I’m amazed at how this album is frequently left out of discussions surrounding Bury Your Dead and their legacy within metalcore and heavy music in general, as it’s often overlooked by fans for the well-loved but rather one-note albums of the early Bruso-helmed catalogue.

Album opener “Sympathy Orchestra” starts off unassuming enough: pneumatic down-tuned chugs, whipcrack snare hits, ominous bass thrum, and Terry’s commanding bark. But it only takes that first minute for things to get a little weird. MacDonald and Ellis unfurl these curious, serpentine grooves reminiscent of Fear Factory or Sepultura and when Terry launches into the track’s chorus, he pairs a midrange sing-scream refrain with a soaring lead riff to great effect.

Similarly on the two-step inducing “Hands to Hide The Shame,” things feel familiar yet strange. The quintet picks up the tempo to crank out a sub-three-minute rager where Castillo’s furious double kick is the real star, blitzing through the track like a demented jackhammer. Terry keeps pace though, with his rapid verses funnelling into another super catchy chorus punctuated by gruff backing shouts.

Bury Your Dead of old this is not. The electronic glitches of Beauty and the Breakdown are present once again, yet heightened and more prominent this time around courtesy of returning producer Jason Suecof (Chimaira, DevilDriver, All That Remains). And sure, much of it is still essentially one giant breakdown, so there’s that, but there’s also a dark thematic undertone and melodic slickness to the presentation here that makes it hit in a new and compelling way.

While I was listening to the record for this piece and thinking through my attachment to it, I remembered that I interviewed Bubble way, way back in the neverland of 2009 on the eve of the band’s first Australian tour. It was for a now-defunct, local street press magazine (remember those?), so there’s no link here for posterity’s sake but you’ll just have to trust me on this. Here’s the quote:

“I’m at this point in my life now, where when I listen to a record, I just wanna be able to rock out to it. I don’t wanna have to figure it out or listen to 3000 little parts. I just want to put it in and know what I’m going to get straight away. It’s a lot like pop music; where you put in the CD, and then you’re off and jamming straight away. Just put it in and party!”

And I think this is the logic that makes Bury Your Dead click in my head. From hardcore kids posturing as not-so wannabe gangs and moshing each other to death, to slightly older adults, touring and playing shows to thousands of fans, it makes sense that Bubble & Co wanted to streamline what they do, making it more immediate, more efficient, and instantly connectable to new audiences.

Enter “Fever Dream,” the LP’s lead single and undeniable heavy music banger. It’s easily one of the band’s best-ever songs with a truly monstrous hook, vocal overlays, and a sublime lead groove tailor-made for subliminal head-banging. Composition wise, the track also represents—for me anyway—the ideal synthesis of hardcore fury with stadium metal. There’s just enough bite and edge for the pit but plenty of bounce for the fans in the stands.

The rest of the record powers through this synthesis with confidence and style with pounding rhythms and flashy grooves (“Angel with a Dirty Face”; “A Devil’s Ransom”; “Fool’s Gold”), heavy staccato ‘car mosh’ moments (“Womb Disease”; “Disposably Yours”) and lofty choruses bolstered by melodic guitar work (“Infidel’s Hymn”; “Year One” featuring Mark Tremonti; “Dust to Dust”).

Returning to that interview with Bubble once again, he offers up one more telling tidbit that explains the rationale and creative process behind LP#4:

“Lately we’ve been doing a lot of bigger, metal tours and we’ve been getting all our fans coming to support us which has been really awesome. There’s never once been a moment where we’ve looked at each other and gone, ‘Wow, people just really don’t like this stuff.’ That’s just the way you progress as a band. We never would have been able to write Cover Your Tracks ten times in a row.”

With a tumultuous line-up that was always in flux, Bury Your Dead came out of the desire to be constantly evolving as artists, forever hungry and never stagnant. And even though I didn’t personally enjoy the band’s immediate follow-up, 2009’s nu-metal aping It’s Nothing Personal, I still respect their desire to push the creative envelope and be more than just the mosh band with Tom Cruise song title references.

To wrap things up, here’s my original review of Bury Your Dead from 2009 and another now-defunct local print magazine. It’s bad in a funny way. I’m pretty sure “cymbally” isn’t a real adverb and there’s also a running food metaphor that feels kind of goofy in retrospect, but hey, I was 20, okay? Leave me alone.

Artist: Botch

Title: American Nervoso

Release: May 20th, 1998

Label: Hydra Head Records

Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify

Earlier this month, it was announced that legendary chaos merchants Botch had signed to Sargent House Records. And of course, the internet lost its collective shit over the news. Had the band reformed for good? Would there be a new album? Why now?

While rumours of new material on the horizon appear to have been greatly exaggerated, the announcement was a welcome development for avid vinyl collectors eagerly awaiting a re-issue of the band’s now-iconic albums. Which got me thinking: I think it’s time we talked about American Nervoso.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

For me, listening to music has always been a process of discovery in reverse. I know that sounds dumb and flagrantly paradoxical but let allow me to explain.

In the later years of high school, I was getting into the prominent surge of second wave metalcore. You know the stuff: Misery Signals, As I Lay Dying, Bleeding Through, Parkway Drive, It Dies Today, Killswitch Engage, Unearth, etc. But lumped along with these bands were a collection of more abrasive and angular entries, namely chaotic hardcore acts like Norma Jean and The Chariot.

Now, my seventeen-year-old self didn’t exactly have the biggest education in obscure subgenres of alternative music. However, what I did like to do was learn. I would read and collect magazines voraciously, scouring the internet for tour posters and merch worn by my favourite bands, before using those as launchpad search material to find their favourite bands.

And it was in one of those feverish moments when I opened up the October 2005 issue of Alternative Press (#207) with Fall Out Boy on the cover, and came across a review of Norma Jean’s second album, O’ God The Aftermath:

Under the laser-sharp guidance of producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Mastodon), the quintet sound like they’re channeling the ghosts of Botch (a whole lot of Botch, actually) and Coalesce via Pantera through most of the album: Time signatures jerk and convulse; guitar riffs slide off the fretboard and cut against the beat; and [Cory] Brandan's vocals-usually fierce, occasionally melodic-beat listeners over the head with lyrics that, while ambiguous and open to interpretation, ultimately lead back to the same God whose presence guides every band on Solid State Records.

Now, this raised some interesting questions. Who was Matt Bayles? Who was Mastodon? Or Coalesce? And, perhaps most importantly, who was Botch, this curious spectral progenitor for Norma Jean’s aggressive sonic chaos? I, for one, endeavoured to find out. And it was during this discovery session that I found two of my favourite artists and records of all time: 2005’s Menos El Oso by Minus The Bear and 2004’s Panopticon by Isis.

Yet, in tracing the legacy of stylistic influence that ran through Norma Jean, The Chariot and the state of chaotic hardcore at the time, I came across an entirely new subgenre (‘mathcore’), a new band and a ‘new’ album that blew my little delinquent mind.

What’s truly crazy about American Nervoso is how astoundingly fresh it sounds, even 23 years on. Hardcore as a musical genre doesn’t exactly have the longest shelf life, but there’s something incredibly engaging, sophisticated and endlessly mutable in the way Botch composed their material, giving it a half-life many of their peers could only dream of. Take, for example, the album’s blistering opening salvo: “Hutton’s Great Heat Engine.”

The track kicks off with Dave Knudson’s serpentine riff magic, winding and slithering across the track’s sonic range. It’s a lick that feels penetrative, like a figurative and literal hook that gets stuck inside you, while bassist Brian Cook and drummer Tim Latona crash and lurch through each rhythmic stop-start motion.

When the quartet finally reach a stage of perpetual motion, vocalist Dave Verellen arrives and consummately shreds his larynx in a matter of seconds with harsh distortion and banshee screams. And this is only the first minute. By the time the breakdown hits, all hell breaks loose and it sounds like the heat death of the universe, as the fabric of space and time breaks down around you.

What makes American Nervoso remarkable is the level of restraint on display. Sure, the band can rocket forward into sheer chaos at any moment, but they’re just as likely to slow things right down and let you soak in the debris for a while.

“John Woo” has an insane mid-section freak out punctuated by a sledgehammer riff that slowly phases into a mild-mannered prog jam session. And then, just when you’ve collected your breath, they’re immediately back to being a sonic wrecking ball.

The band return to this pattern time and time again across the album (“Dali’s Praying Mantis”; “Rejection Spoken Softly”; “Oma”) yet still make each composition singular and unique. Bayles’ production is crisp and punchy without losing any of the band’s grit or texture; heavier moments have this raw physicality to them, where you can almost taste the sweat and feel the basement show heat radiating outwards.

“Thank God for Worker Bees” might just be the best song on the record, and there’s a reason why it’s the diehard fan’s favourite Botch number. Knudson’s asymmetrical riffage is finger-melting, with brisk tempo changes and discordant warbling every few seconds. Cook and Latona sound possessed and Verellen’s lyrics are dripping with sardonic wage-slavery ire:

“And that’s why/

We dine on your design/

I like the look on your face/

It’s bittersweet, and lasts/

For six hours/

Alone for one day and six hours.”

When that final earthquake crescendo is unleashed, it feels like someone taking a jackhammer to your spine, shot through with icepick panic chords and a general sense of all-consuming, pervasive dread.

I think part of Botch’s mystique is primarily due to their absence. They were around in the ‘90s, dropped two albums and a few EPs, before ultimately parting ways in 2002. And that’s it. What’s left is, to borrow a phrase, all on the page (or in this case, the record).

As J. Bennett writes in “The Oral History of Botch” for Alternative Press:

It is entirely possible that many of the bands who have recently appeared in the pages of this very publication would not be the musicians they are today without Botch. At the very least, those bands—the Underoaths, the Norma Jeans, the Thrices—would sound very different had Botch never existed.

At a time when the local hardcore scene (led by Himsa vocalist John Pettibone’s old straight-edge crew, Undertow) was on the verge of extinction, four guys from the suburbs with virtually nothing in common—except a love of Helmet and the (eventual) ability to play the living shit out of their instruments—laid the white-hot template for a generation of bands that followed.

Additionally, their press release for Sargent House makes clear, that Botch’s eventual split “made way for members to form and or to play in other highly notable and influential bands including Minus the Bear, These Arms Are Snakes, Narrows, SUMAC and current Sargent House bands Russian Circles and Torment & Glory.”

And while their follow-up record, 1999’s We Are the Romans is widely considered to be their masterpiece, there’s an air of spontaneity and complete lack of pretension to American Nervoso that will always stick with me.

It’s a collection of nine tracks that are every bit as tense and frantic as the record’s title suggests. The perfect soundtrack for an empire with an uncertain future, staring down the barrel of the End of History.

Artist: Gallows

Title: Grey Britain

Release: May 2nd, 2009

Label: Warner Bros.

Listen here: Spotify | Youtube

I’m a little late with this one already. So, in the interest of time, here’s the preemptive TL;DR:

Grey Britain, the second full-length album from UK hardcore outfit Gallows, is one of my favourite records of all time and one of the most underrated albums of the millennium. I’m hard-pressed to think of a punk rock album from the last two decades that has as much bite, thematic weight, and pure, unadulterated rage on display as this thirteen-track behemoth. It’s a truly staggering record that continues to floor me in new ways twelve years on from its release.

Before things get carried away here, let’s add some historical context.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

A decade ago, England was on fire. The unrest began in Tottenham Hale, London on August 4, 2011, when a man named Mark Duggan was shot dead by police. In scenes that echo the global protests surrounding the death of George Floyd in 2020, the “London riots” as they came to be known quickly grew to include clashes between protestors and police, widespread looting and the destruction of numerous vehicles, homes and shop fronts.

Between August 6-11, 2011, thousands of civilians rioted all across the country, in Woolwich, Brixton, Peckham, Hackney, Enfield, Battersea, Walthamstow, Croydon, Ealing, Barking, Lewisham and East Ham, through to Birmingham, West Bromwich, Bristol, Coventry, Derby, Liverpool, Manchester, Leicester, Nottingham, and Wolverhampton before the inflamed violence was finally snuffed out. There were thousands of arrests, multiple people admitted with severe injuries and five deaths. I could link to relevant sources, but honestly, this Architects track is probably better suited for getting the point across:

The London riots are largely viewed as the product of growing discontent and malaise while the UK struggled to come out of the global recession that marked much of the late 2000s. Social factors included rising unemployment, bitter class divides, racial tensions, and economic stagnation.

It’s this context, I feel, that makes Grey Britain burn that much brighter as a historical document. Not only through the incendiary hardcore punk on offer or the record’s ambitious thematic scope, but in its dire and unwavering presentation of things to come. A bold prophecy of provocation and pain, of ceaseless class war, of a Britain violently bleed dry of all its pomp and prestige.

In the mid-2000s, Gallows were the piss-and-vinegar vanguard of the UK hardcore punk scene. Through enigmatic ginger frontman Frank Carter and his pitbull stage presence, the band embodied a return to the hallowed ideals of punk rebellion that thrived on real danger and genuine excitement.

Fans fought for the privilege of their raucous and bloody live shows. Critics praised Carter’s biting social commentary, which often cast an unflattering light on the ills and anxieties of urban existence. On “Come Friendly Bombs,” taken from the group’s breakneck debut, Orchestra of Wolves (2006), Carter’s apathetic snarl sums up the feeling of a dead-end England in a single bar:

“Black knuckles and broken teeth/

Grey days and grey streets/

The same faces, the same release/

If this town had a name it would be defeat.”

This notion of a world drained of all its colour and vibrancy is a theme the band would eagerly return to in the years to come. Epitaph’s Brett Gurewitz declared Orchestra of Wolves to be the best hardcore album since Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come (1998), adding: “This is the band we’ve all been waiting for.”

Gallows had broken through and captivated audiences with a sound that was urgent, vital and uncompromising. They were the name on everyone’s lips and they were just getting started.

Naturally then, the suits came knocking. The band raised the eyebrows of punk purists by signing a deal with major label Warner Bros. and reportedly received a £1 million advance for their sophomore follow-up album. In 2008, Gallows decamped across the pond to Vancouver, BC, to record with Canadian producer and engineer Garth “GGGarth” Richardson (Atreyu, Biffy Clyro, Rise Against).

In February of 2009, Carter explained to Kerrang that the band’s new record, Grey Britain, was “about what’s going on socially, politically and economically in the UK and how it affects us,” and added with a hint of grim resignation that “Britain is fucked.”

The quintet then teased the album’s material in the following April with the pre-release single, “The Vulture (Acts I & II)”: a sprawling six-minute ballad that included string theatrics and the unexpected addition of Carter’s clean singing.

Grey Britain was released on May 2nd and followed by two singles: the upbeat punk ‘n’ roll revelry of “London Is The Reason” and the bludgeoning sonic beatdown of “Misery.” In December of that same year, less than twelve months after the record’s arrival, Gallows announced that they had “mutually” parted ways with Warner Bros.

At the time of release, critical reception to Grey Britain was largely mixed. Writing for The Quietus, Stephen Burkett described the record as “a slightly missed opportunity” and “enough of a blast to remind people why Gallows are important to so many, but not quite the focused wrench it could have been.” This was a sentiment shared by NME’s Dan Martin, who argued that “if the world that Gallows depict is even half-accurate, it’s not one you’d want to live in. And it’s doubtful you’d want to listen to its soundtrack many times either.”

Others were slightly more receptive. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis enjoyed the “livid vigour” of ruthless cuts like “Black Eyes” and album closer “Crucifucks,” along with Carter’s “ability to articulate disgust and despair with such visceral force,” but struggled to engage with the album’s “relentlessly horrible” thematic portent. Not so for his colleague, Jon Savage, who praised the band’s spirit and prescience, “and their willingness to engage with a recognisable social reality.”

Grey Britain, in this humanist view, attempted to “inject into British rock music the sense of standing for or against something, the feeling that there is something more at stake than money, fame and self, the belief that human beings are important.”

Still, twelve years on, the record has found love and recognition in retrospect. Approaching the album’s tenth anniversary in 2018, NME named the album as one of the best hardcore albums of all time, one that took the genre to “places most could only dream of—a truly epic documentation of modern British malaise, that’s as vital now as the day it was released.” Similarly, Metal Hammer declared the album to be “a sprawling, ugly, bleak, punk rock masterpiece” that “horrified the mainstream [and] inspired a whole generation of heavy UK hardcore bands.”

Legacy, however, is a curious thing. Taking a cursory look at lists for Best-Of punk albums—Paste’s “25 Best Punk Albums of the 2000s”; Rolling Stone’s “40 Greatest Punk Albums of All Time”; SPIN’s “Top 50 Essential Punk Albums”; Treble Zine’s “100 Best Punk Albums”—and one finds that Grey Britain is nowhere to be found.

If anything, for me at least, Grey Britain stands as a testament to sticking by your principles. “We are the British music industry’s biggest mistake,” quipped Carter in the aftermath of the album and their subsequent label shelving, with guitarist Laurent “Lags” Barnard adding: “We see other bands being told what to do by their paymasters, but we’re not one of them.”

For Gallows, punk was an art form, deserving a level of reverence that the corporatists dare not price in. Ultimately, it’s The Guardian’s Ben Myers who sums up Gallows “great rock ‘n’ roll swindle” the best:

For a group that recalled second-wave UK punk bands like Discharge, it was the most brilliantly ridiculous major-label signing of recent times... But on the surface what looked like an underachievement is actually the opposite: with their uncompromising sound and brawling live shows Gallows have gone further than any British hardcore band ever has.

Spiritual forefathers such as Black Flag, Crass and Concrete Sox might have rightly railed against the establishment, but major-record deals were never an option for them. Gallows did the right thing. Knowing they could never be Green Day they took the money, toured the world and recorded an album so brutal no one could ever accuse them of selling out.

The dangerous thing about prophecy, of course, is the potential for it to come true. The explosive tumult of the London riots and its aftermath certainly vindicated Grey Britain’s nihilistic portrait of Rule Britannia as a fallen wasteland sinking into a self-made morass of corruption, rage and ruin. If like me, you’re happy to entertain a mostly cynical worldview, there’s a clear narrative throughline to be drawn here from the London riots to Brexit in 2016 and the state of the UK today.

Carter, who went on to leave Gallows in 2011 and pivot to the slightly more cheerful sounds of Pure Love and The Rattlesnakes, confessed to VICE in 2019:

Financially, we [the UK] never recovered, and then morally and governmentally we’re in fucking bits. We’re in pieces, and no one knows what the fuck is going on. All that’s done is nurtured a widespread hatred, and fear, and grand disillusionment—which is all in that record!

It was there as a precursor ten fuckin’ years ago... The xenophobia, and the agoraphobia, and the hatred that I was singing about then, that was my fear. We were writing about a post-apocalyptic future in London. And, unfortunately, now… I’m living in it.

Artist: Poison The Well

Title: The Opposite of December... A Season of Separation

Release: December 14th, 1999

Label: Trustkill Records

Listen here: Spotify | YouTube

If, like me, you spend all of your time writing about music and the cultural legacy of musical genres, then it’s all too easy to view time as a purely quantitative thing: i.e., there’s never enough of it, you always want more, and you often wish it would just slow the fuck down and chill out. But, guess what? Psych! Time isn’t real, and neither are flat circles. (Eat shit, Nietzsche.)

All jokes aside, though, when I sit down to write these retrospective pieces, I’m often struck by how profoundly relational and qualitative time actually is to music. In particular, I realise now upon reflection that a lot of music from my youth and young adulthood actually required spatio-temporal distance at the time of release for me to appreciate and unlock its secrets.

Such is the case with The Opposite of December…, the debut full-length album from metalcore pioneers Poison The Well, released towards the twilight end of the last millennium through genre staple Trustkill Records.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

Gather round children, let’s talk about metalcore! In the ‘90s, metalcore wasn’t in its infancy exactly, but it was still finding and using its feet. As a subgenre amalgamation extending from the traditional school of heavy metal and the rouble-rousing anarchy of hardcore punk, metalcore’s first wave is best exemplified by the tough-guy, crossover material we would classify as “metallic hardcore” today.

The slippage of prefixes, or lack thereof, is crucial because what separates metallic hardcore from metalcore by the late ‘90s is fairly arbitrary. Notable names include Integrity, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Hatebreed, Shai Hulud, Earth Crisis, Vision of Disorder, Converge, Rorschach, Snapcase, Bloodlet, Deadguy, All Out War, Strife, Trial, Morning Again, among many others. Some of these acts tended to be more discordant and chaotic, hitting the math textbooks for tempo changes and scales. In contrast, others are really just straightforward thumpers with a laser focus on being as crushing and sonically devastating as possible.

What makes Poison The Well important, then, is their divergence from this model and how the style of metalcore they established with The Opposite of December… would go on to define the genre throughout the 2000s.

On its face, nothing about The Opposite of December… sounds revolutionary to audiences in 2021. The one-two combo of album opener “12/23/93” and “A Wish For Wings That Work” announces this second wave metalcore relic as an entirely familiar and formidable beast.

Frontman Jeffrey Moreira’s acerbic screams crash against Ryan Primack’s melodic leads and future Sleigh Bells axe-slinger Derek Miller’s rhythmic chugs. Tracks ebb and flow with the poised grace of a melodramatic stage play, where moments of solitude and solemn, spoken-word reflection are violently distended by serrated guitar eruptions and a truly mammoth rhythm section.

As Eli Enis details for Revolver magazine, in listing the album among the 10 Most Influential Metalcore Albums of All Time, “by trading tough-guy grunts for the ripe emotionality of Nineties screamo, Poison the Well made room for shaky cleans and speak-singing yelps.” We hear this in Moreira’s pained vocal contortions in the bludgeoning “Artist’s Rendering Of Me,” or the bitter sting of resignation that haunts Side B cut “Mid Air Move Message.” Enis continues:

For as unique as it was at the time, nothing about Opposite sounds groundbreaking today, which is a testament to the universal impact this album had on the decade that followed.

To make this emo/screamo connection more concrete, allow me to draw from my own well (pun intended) of personal experience. In 1999, when The Opposite of December… was released, Limp Bizkit were huge (as I covered here for those of you who are partial to the nookie), and Blink-182 had just popped into super-stardom with The Enema of the State. I was 11 at the time and likely more concerned with watching The Phantom Menace for the 50th time rather than paying any attention whatsoever to the Floridian hardcore scene. However, by the time the early ‘00s rolled around, and my teenage angst was in full bloom, my musical tastes had begun to veer off in strange, new directions.

My love for pop-punk morphed into palatable emo and alt-rock tendencies, with bands like Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday and Brand New dominating my CD wallet (remember those?). And on the nu-metal side of things, I started to dabble with bands like Slipknot, Pantera and Mudvayne, which, weirdly enough, eventually led to more emo-leaning post-hardcore acts like Funeral for a Friend, Thursday and Finch. And yet, even at this stage, metalcore as an accessible thing wasn’t on my musical radar.

It wasn’t until a friend of mine introduced me to a whole host of prominent ‘scene’ bands like Killswitch Engage, Bleeding Through and, of course, Poison The Well, that everything finally clicked into place. Suddenly my desire to emotionally vent my Super-Important Teenage Feelings found a way to fuse with my visceral passion for the aggressive musculature of metal. Ballads and breakdowns, folks—it’s an unbeatable combination.

As Andrew Sacher notes for Brooklyn Vegan, Poison The Well are “sort of the connecting tissue between earlier metalcore bands like Earth Crisis and Snapcase and more popular post-hardcore bands like Thrice and Thursday.” And this genre fusion is everpresent on The Opposite of December, from the cathartic pummeling of the now-iconic “Nerdy” to the catchy transitions in “To Mandate Heaven.”

All of this is to say that, with a nine-track, 28-minute album, Poison The Well managed to kick start a revolution in metalcore that is, in many ways, still one of the most dominant heavy music styles. Along with acts borrowing liberally from the Gothenburg school of melodic death metal, the type of sing-scream, verse-chorus model perfected by Poison The Well is still referenced today.

And truthfully, there’s a reason publications like Revolver and Brooklyn Vegan, along with others like Kerrang and Loudwire, frequently cite The Opposite of December… as a landmark record: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and flattery will get you everywhere.

Artist: Alexisonfire

Title: Old Crows/ Young Cardinals

Release: June 23rd, 2009

Label: Dine Alone

Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube

It’s strange to think that the last Alexisonfire album came out twelve years ago. From our dizzyingly surreal vantage point, the naive, proto-always online world of 2009 feels like a lifetime ago.

That said, the band continue to be one of the most loved and well-respected outfits of the mid-00’s post-hardcore boom. Go to a show (if they still do those things in your arena of the post-COVID hellscape), pick a person at random, and chances are they’ll at least know the words to “This Could Be Anywhere In The World,” and/or adore records like 2006’s Crisis and 2004’s Watch Out!.

Even after their huge farewell tour and short-lived hiatus from 2011 to 2015, followed only by a smattering of singles, live compilations and EP’s as drip-fed new material, it’s not like Alexisonfire have wained in popularity or cultural purchase over time. The band are still cited as a direct influence for acts like Cancer Bats, Silverstein, and Four Year Strong, and their ever-expanding roster of member side projects is extensive and prolific.

At this point, Dallas Green has a larger discography than the rest of the band put together, including six albums with City and Colour and a full-length album with Pink under the moniker You+Me. Frontman George Pettit’s current heavy outfit Dead Tired continue to churn out rowdy bangers, with a live performance featured in season two of the Amazon Prime series, The Boys. Wade MacNeil is the vocalist for UK hardcore outfit Gallows, following Frank Carter’s exit in 2011, has solo efforts with his long-running punk band Black Lungs, new project Doom’s Children, and even a recent turn towards composing film scores.

All of this makes the conversation—or lack thereof—surrounding the band’s fourth LP, Old Crows/ Young Cardinals, all the more curious.

Share The Pitch of Discontent

I was 21 when Old Crows/ Young Cardinals came out and I was, admittedly, still very much in my ‘I Only Listen to Hardcore and Metal’ phase of musical discovery. Accordingly, my most vivid memory of listening to this album at that time is one of casual indifference. I certainly didn’t hate the record outright but I wasn’t immediately sold on it either.

If you had pressed me then to explain exactly why that was, or what perceived inadequacies the record contained as compared to my idealised version of the perfect Alexisonfire album, I would have likely drawn a blank. Even twelve years distant, my thoughts remain just as vague.

While it’s hardly an original take, I do think certain albums work as time capsules—intentionally or otherwise. Some records are forever locked in your mind as a victim of spatio-temporal circumstance, linked to break-ups and exes, traumatic episodes or pivotal moments in your life no matter what happens along the way. They’re forms of subconscious nostalgia: feel good (or bad) slices of the past that can hurl you back into a different mood in the space of a 4/4 beat.

Others, however, are more of a mature slow-burn. The elusive “growers” of a band’s discography that requiring changes in you as the listener in order to be unlocked, before the album is able to truly resonate and stick with you.

To me, Old Crows/Young Cardinals easily falls into that latter category. I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the way, I decided that I actually really like this album and that it might just be the underrated, sleeper hit of the band’s back catalogue.

Objectively, it’s their most commercially successful album too, charting well across the US, UK, Australia, and in their native Canada, where the band enjoy pseudo-rockstar levels of fame and platinum sales. And while it might not have the streaming numbers of something as universally loved as Crisis, it’s still a regular feature on playlists for devoted fans across the world.

The one-two punch of the album’s title track opening salvo makes it clear how far the band had come from their humble beginnings in the potent punk and metal scene of Southern Ontario.

“Old Crows” crawls with a mid-tempo bass thrum and the band’s now-iconic, honey & vinegar vocal interplay, before erupting into an anthemic chorus lead not by guitarist and angelic vocalist Green, or larynx-shredder Petitt, but by gravel-throated MacNeil. It may have taken four full-length albums, but the band’s realisation of their triumvirate vocal talent allows this record to careen from gruff punk to coarse screamo and soaring alt-pop with a level of cohesion unrivalled by the majority of their peers.

Similarly, “Young Cardinals” takes the stadium-ready chorus formula featured on much of Crisis and wields it like a superweapon. Green’s soaring hook here—along with the subtle background harmonies that bolster it—is absolutely gargantuan and borderline transcendent. The track is at once recognisable as uniquely Alexis and utterly infectious, remaining one of their greatest tunes and an instant post-hardcore classic.

Continuing Side A’s impressive run, “Born and Raised” highlights the scope of the band’s vision, pairing call-and-response bangers with Green and MacNeil’s stellar guitar work. The rollicking rhythm section workout from “No Rest” finds Alexis at their most propulsive, throwing back to the urgency and kinetic thrill of their earlier records. Meanwhile, switching back to a mid-tempo atmosphere, “The Northern” hits like a cross between Planes Mistaken For Stars and The Gaslight Anthem, with Petitt’s organ in the verses adding delicate hints of folk and ritualistic undertones.

And yet, the more I listen to Old Crows/ Young Cardinals, the more the record’s track sequencing becomes both a surprise and a treasure. Side B might not rack up the impressive streaming numbers of its other half, but the songwriting leaves little to suggest a drop in quality. “Midnight Regulations” and “Heading For The Sun” are just as catchy and dynamic as any of the record’s singles or smash hits from Crisis, with Green, MacNeil and Pettit wrapping their vocal lines around one another in a way that feels effortlessly natural and powerful.

I’ve been listening to Alexisonfire now for over half of my entire life. The band’s self-titled album and 2004’s Watch Out! soundtracked my burgeoning adolescence with molten screamo and pop-adjacent hooks. Crisis aligns with leaving home and the burden of young adulthood, recalling shitty bar jobs, house parties, getting day drunk and dating people I haven’t seen or spoken to in years.

It’s fitting then that if Old Crows/ Young Cardinals has any lasting legacy, it’s in reminding me that nothing in life is static. Everything—including ourselves—is capable of change, always and forever. As Green croons in “Born and Raised”:

“We were born and raised/

To live beyond/

The heft and weight of a world undone.

Like a bird from the north/

Our hearts will roam in search of warmth.”

Artist: Cave In

Title: Jupiter

Release: August 8th, 2000

Label: Hydra Head Records

Listen here: Bandcamp

I have a confession to make. In the year 2000, I wasn’t listening to Cave In. Look, I know. I’m a poser and it pains me to admit that the progressive veterans of the Massachusetts hardcore scene were not on my radar at the time. However, I was eleven years old, likely far more concerned with killing time on my Playstation and watching Star Wars. So, ah, cut me some slack, okay?

In many ways, the cultural climate of the year 2000 can be seen as a crucial inflection point for the trajectory of alternative music over the next two decades. The world was in a liminal state of post-Y2K, pre-9/11 zeitgeist formation as the ‘90s gave way to the turn of the millennium and the seemingly boundless future of the ‘00s.

Boys bands were dying off and bling rap was steadily dominating the airwaves. Coming off the runaway commercial success of 1999’s Enema of the State, Blink-182 were pushing adolescent pop-punk to the masses. Woodstock '99, which featured notable performances from acts like DMX, Rage Against The Machine, Korn, and Metallica—alongside riots and fatal injuries—had scared the shit out of people, some even going out on a superlative limb to label it “the day the music died.” Meanwhile, groups like Linkin Park, Deftones and Limp Bizkit dropped massive, career-defining records that took nu-metal to stratospheric new heights.

To this messy cultural environment, enters Cave In and their then-controversial, now-classic sophomore LP, Jupiter.

On their 1998 Hydra Head debut, Until Your Heart Stops, Cave In were firmly lumped into the metalcore camp—that is, late ‘90s first/second wave metalcore, depending on where and how you do your pedant demarcation (think metalcore here as “heavy metallic hardcore” rather than “melodic death metal influenced, sing-scream chorus” stuff).

Produced by Converge mastermind and close friend Kurt Ballou, the album features some of Cave In’s most incendiary compositions, with tracks like “Moral Eclipse” and “Juggernaut” rippling with the manic staccato riffage of guitarists Stephen Brodsky and Adam McGrath, John-Robert Conners’ frenzied drumming, and coarse screams traded between Brodsky and bassist Caleb Scofield.

However, soon after Cave In finished that album’s touring cycle, it became clear that a shake-up was coming. While the seismic shift in sound and style present on Jupiter appears stark in comparison to their debut, several clues abounded as to where the band eventually wanted to end up.

In May of 1999, the band dropped the Creative Eclipses EP, a release that rapidly departed from their molten metalcore template and embraced a wide swath of instrumental inclinations: calm over chaos, psychedelic progressions, and a greater emphasis on clean signing and Brodsky’s eclectic dynamic range.

Working with producer Brian McTernan—whose impressive discography cut between hardcore mainstays like Bane, Converge and Drowningman, as well as emo icons like Piebald, Texas Is The Reason and The Promise Ring—Cave In sought to incorporate the spacey atmospherics and alt-rock tendencies of acts like Hum and Failure into their robust metal template (i.e. see the cover of Failure’s “Magnified” sequenced into the EP’s middle). This in turn, made McTernan the no-brainer choice for producer of their ambitious album follow-up.

Listening to Jupiter now is still a journey. The opening title track smacks you in the face with McTernan’s bright production, contrasting a charging lead riff from Brodsky with crisp, sizzling drums from Conners and Scofield’s rumbling, sticky low-end, the kind that made alt-rock riffs land right in your solar plexus, really feeling like metal.

Delivering the album’s first line of verse, Brodsky’s mid-range croon is a curious thing: twangy and inflected, unwieldy and uncanny, a little left-of-centre for standard rock, at once strangely familiar and familiarly strange:

“The metronome was wrong again/

My heart has surely gone and skipped a beat.

And once the rhythm is all right/

I can understand your point of view.”

Across Jupiter, Cave In cast the listener off onto the edge of their own mind, floating through journey’s both deeply inward and dazzlingly vast.

“In the Stream of Commerce” flirts with Middle Eastern guitar lines and a backing haze of warped delays and warbling synths. “Innuendo and Out the Other” wraps around Brodsky’s high falsetto, flitting over twinkling riffs and sludgy rhythmic shifts. Straight-forward rocker “Brain Candle” is Cave In doing their most overt Hum worship with suitably electric results, and the prog freak-out “Decay of the Delay” dips right into Pink Floyd territory.

And yet, talk to anyone about Jupiter or Cave In’s musical orbit in general, and chances are that conversation will eventually turn to “Big Riff.” And it’s easy to see why. It’s the easy album standout and one of the band’s most iconic compositions—for very good reason.

Firstly, it’s just a ballsy thing to call a rock song. Simple yet effective. But secondly, Cave In aren’t here to fuck around and they absolutely deliver on that promise. The track does indeed have riffs and they’re positively gargantuan, clashing with Brodsky’s occasional curdling scream like the cosmic ballet of errant space debris.

Commercially, Cave In went on to have plenty of ups and downs in their career, including major label fuckery, hiatuses, and even the tragic passing of Scofield in 2018. But they continued to push themselves creatively, both within the band and elsewhere, working on numerous side projects like Mutoid Man, Kid Kilowatt, Old Man Gloom, and Zozobra.

At a critical level, Jupiter divided many fans upon its release. The band’s stylistic pivot was untenable for some hardliners, while others took time to grow and evolve with their band on their own musical journey.

Hindsight is a powerful thing, and it goes a long way to explaining how Lambgoat called Jupiter “innovative” in 2000, while Pitchfork denigrated the album as “arty metal.” Only a few short years later, Decibel would place it at #2 in their list of Top 100 Greatest Metal Albums Of The Decade, second only to Converge’s indomitable Jane Doe (2001), while Brooklyn Vegan wrote about how Jupiter helped influence the post-hardcore boom of the 2000s.

In that sense then, whether or not I was aware of Jupiter in the year 2000 is of little consequence. I enjoy it now, knowing full well the import it had on shaping alternative music across the vast expanse of space and time.

Artist: The Chariot

Title: Long Live

Release: November 23, 2010

Label: Good Fight Music

Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify

If you’ve ever been to a hardcore show, then you know what controlled chaos feels like. That electric sensation of tense apprehension, the thrill of unknowing, of frantically holding lightning in a bottle, understanding that at any moment it might suddenly escape and shock you.

Like most things we undertake in public as a group of collective animals, there’s a social contract involved here as well. In any other scenario, being lifted in the air and held aloft by strangers would be viewed as a violation of norms. The same goes with the inherent danger of having random fists and feet swing and jump in your general vicinity, with little regard for your safety and well-being. The dense pressure of steaming sweaty bodies crushed together in waves of violent undulation.

And yet, all of this works without the need for police or security guards for one very important reason: catharsis. A hardcore show is nothing but pure purgation, a figurative bloodletting for the soul. It’s a collective pursuit, recognised by the commons, and desired equally by all.

The experience is a self-correcting system, shifting the bounds of what is or isn’t acceptable by those directly participating within it. It’s a pressure valve from the strong, repressed emotions we all feel, a yearning for the joy of sweet relief.

Long Live, the fourth LP from Georgian mathcore outfit The Chariot, captures the essence, immediacy, and vitality of a hardcore show. Since 2003, the band had cultivated an almost mythological reputation for insane live shows, many of which regularly featured daring leaps into the crowd, instruments played in a variety of locations (least of which the stage itself), and attendees taking over the mic for entire songs at a stretch.

Conceived in early 2010 with producer Matt Goldman (Underoath, As Cities Burn), much of the album was recorded live to tape, allowing the group—vocalist Josh Scogin, guitarist and backing vocalist Stephen Harrison, guitarist Jon Terrey, bassist Jon Kindler, and drummer David Kennedy—to harness their live-wire energy in real-time.

In April 2011, I got the rare chance to witness The Chariot’s live show for myself (see video above). On their first-ever Australian tour and opening leg of three Queensland shows, I saw the band play in two intimate and vastly different settings: a DIY warehouse show at Sun Distortion Studios, and a club night appearance at the bar X&Y.

What followed was some of the wildest shit I’ve ever seen at a show. Endless flailing limbs. Massive pile-on’s from show attendees and band members. People throwing themselves into Kennedy’s drum kit. Streamers of toilet paper and assorted detritus erupting from the pit. Harrison and others standing on amps, climbing fences and staircases, only to jump into the waiting arms of patrons. Scogin parting the crowd in two, forming a path for the band to disassemble the stage backline, piece by piece, and reassemble it in the concrete parking lot of an industrial estate outside—all of this happening mid-song.

It was crazy. It was beautiful. And it was a borderline religious experience.

On Long Live, it’s difficult to separate musicality from theology.

Throughout their career, The Chariot made no secret about their Christian background and refused to apologise for having religious messages in their lyrics. And truthfully, why should they? Hardcore is often evangelical in a variety of ways, whether it be through straight-edge crews, vegan acolytes or the tenets of Hare Krishna.

Normally, however, this type of content would be an instant turn-off for me. And yet, there was something about the band’s sincerity in action, their way of weaving their touching poetic message into the very fabric of their aural assault, that made the delivery of Long Live so vital and urgent.

This urgency is most pronounced on album standout, “The City.” The track begins as a quintessential Chariot anthem: churning guitar riffage, pounding percussion, cavernous gang vocals, serpentine leads, mathy tempo shifts, and Scogin’s interminable scream. Passages slide and crash together for close to two minutes, anchored by Scogin’s repeated declaration: “This is only a revolt.”

And then, roughly around the track’s halfway point, this instrumental agony subsides, giving way to a soaring ambient expanse of near post-rock precision. Here, Scogin delivers a fierce sermon of hope, resilience, and devotion:

“Calm rose: violent wind.
The only ‘surrender’ tonight, shall not be our own/
They cannot escape, one if by land, two if by sea.
I saved my money, but it can’t save me/
And maybe there is blood from the past, but that is not from me.
They can take away one man, and they can take away his mic/
But they cannot take us all.
No, they can’t dig a hole the right size to fit all of our dreams/
They can’t bury me, they can’t bury me.
We can’t hope that somebody else take our place/
No, we can’t hope that somebody else take our place.

May the history book read of all of our names/
Be it blood, be it ink, but at least we were free.
This is only but a fraction of what I’ve got to say/
It must be said, it must be said.
If I leave this earth tonight may it be said that I spoke my peace/
I spoke with the wrath of his grace.
Calm rose: come violent wind.
Oh, we stand hand in hand and we walk without fear.
This is a revolution.”

Hearing this in my early twenties, stuck in a shitty office job that I hated and squandering my own creativity in the mire of indecision and absence, Scogin’s sermon resonated with me in ways I didn’t think were possible for heavy music. Even now in my thirties, freelancing full-time and comfortably working for myself, I continue to save my money, despite the intimate knowledge that the ills of late capitalism won’t save me or anyone else.

What Long Live taught me then is something I still reflect on now. Have the courage of your convictions. Don’t bury your dreams. Be at peace with your choices—good and bad—and walk through life without fear, without regret. Treat every moment like a hardcore show and grip the lightning with both hands.

Artist: Alkaline Trio

Title: From Here To Infirmary

Release: April 3, 2001

Label: Vagrant Records

Listen here: Spotify | YouTube

It was the dawn of a new millennium. The year was 2001 and things were weird and strange.

Y2K had proven to be nothing but overblown panic. I had just started high school and the cruel kiss of puberty had settled upon my unsuspecting pubescent body. The Fast and the Furious delighted audiences with its tale of sweaty revheads stealing DVD players. South Park hit their creative stride with season five. Limp Bizkit were still riding high off the success of Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (2000). People sang “Rollin’” non-ironically. Skate shoes, bootcut jeans, gelled hair, and wallet chains dominated MTV fashion.

The TV series Jackass was a commercial hit and kids everywhere idolised Tony Hawk. American Pie 2 gave us the sad college sequel to a beloved (and incredibly problematic) comedy. Blink-182 dropped Take Off Your Pants and Jacket and Sum 41 released All Killer No Filler, before spending the next two decades trying to eclipse it. Bush had already won the Florida recount and 9/11 was soon to be a permanent scar on the cultural consciousness of a generation.

Enter Alkaline Trio’s third LP: From Here To Infirmary. Arguably the definitive record of the band’s early era, this twenty-year-old album has it all: a dark and gloomy cover with an undead, goth aesthetic, superb track sequencing, and wide-ranging lyrical themes that tackle alcoholism, loneliness, and forlorn affection.

From Here to Infirmary was the band’s Vagrant Record’s debut, and the only album to feature ex-Smoking Popes member Mike Felumlee on drums, who would be replaced shortly after by Rocket From The Crypt’s Atom Willard as a touring member before the band settled on Derek Grant as a permanent fixture.

Blasting through twelve tracks in a compact 38 minutes, From Here To Infirmary has the kind of relentless energy and forward momentum that’s almost unparalleled in turn-of-the-millennium pop-punk. The one-two punch of the record’s opening salvo draws the listener in with serrated three-chord riffage, punchy back-beat tempos, and vocalist/guitarist Matt Skiba’s affect-heavy drawl.

The chorus of “Private Eye” takes hyperactive paranoia and spins it into Peter Pan syndrome, a perpetual quest to never grow old, staying young, dumb, and most importantly, fun, forever:

“But at the right place at the right time/

I’ll be dead wrong and you’ll be just fine/

And I won’t have to quit, doing fucked up shit/

For anyone but me.”

Only for “Mr. Chainsaw” to bring the harsh reality of wage slavery crashing back down to Earth, as Skiba laments that “Sleeping is my 9 to 5” and “Cubicles will now suffice.” He then channels his apathy into a subsequently grim verse dripping with suburban nihilism:

“When was it that you sold your life or wasted/

Every bite of that small slice you never tasted?

I guess I should be one to talk/

There’s nights that I can’t even walk.

There’s days I couldn’t give a fuck/

And in between is where I’m stuck.”

And if those lyrical allusions aren’t strong enough for you, the frontman straight-up states the thesis in the track’s harmonised closing hook:

“In case you’re wondering, I’m singing about growing up, about giving in.”

In a particularly dismissive review of the album for Pitchfork, John Dark would stretch the allegorical writer’s crutch of food analogies to their eye-rolling limit:

“There’s quite a bit that Alkaline Trio’s music is not. It’s not challenging, ambitious, or visionary. It’s not clever or self-aware. It's not even terribly skillful. But what it is, is tasty. Pure musical junk food: fast, greasy, and crafted for a general palate. Some people can’t bring themselves to ever go to a fast food joint once they’ve tasted better. Others, like me, well... we shouldn’t, but we do, anyway.”

While Dark was apparently lashing himself for the sin of fast food, my teenage self had no such compulsion. Instead, I lapped that shit up and wanted more of it, gleefully swallowing whole—chewing be damned. The catchy, self-deprecating commiseration on From Here To Infirmary was exactly what my hormone-addled brain needed at that particular point in time. I may not have fully understood the depths of depravity inherent in chasing alcoholism or a daily drug habit, but goddamnit (get it?), I could at least want to relate.

Recorded with Chicago producer Matt Allison—who would go on to engineer and produce landmark albums like The Lawrence Arms’ Oh! Calcutta! (2006) and the stellar On The Impossible Past(2012) from The Menzingers—From Here To Infirmary is a pure distillation of pop-punk’s all-too-familiar libidinal drives.

“Stupid Kid” grabs at misplaced love like a petulant child taking back his toys. “Another Innocent Girl” puts women in the firing line as the victims of weak, insecure men hyped up on some of that “self-pity shit.” Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom though. Skiba & Co occasionally inject some levity into the darkness, playing with wit and tongue-in-cheek lyricism, like on the first verse of “You’re Dead”:

“‘Cause if assholes could fly/

This place would be busier than O’Hare.

There’s proof in the sky/

It’s as thick as our skulls, yet it’s thinner than air.”

And it’s clear that Skiba has a literary bent, too. The album’s title is a play on “from here to eternity,” a reference to the Richard Kipling poem and the 1953 Fred Zinnemann war epic of the same name. As they say: “All is fair in love and war.”

The penultimate track “Trucks and Trains” hints at the goth-tinged melodic mastery that the band would later muster on darker follow-up records like 2003’s Good Mourning and 2005’s Crimson, perfectly timed with the eventual rise and crossover of emo into the mainstream lexicon. With a charging lead riff, crunchy bass tone, and soft-loud dynamic reach that pushes Skiba’s vocals into the stratosphere, it’s a clear album stand-out.

Sadly, From Here To Infirmary isn’t held in such high esteem within the band’s membership. Skiba ranks the album fifth in the Alkaline Trio back catalogue, and bassist Dan Andriano puts the record all the way down at seventh out of nine full-length albums. Ouch.

Still, I’m no longer a confused teenager desperately looking up to my idols. If growing up has taught me anything, it’s that adults are just people too, as prone to fallibility and fault as anyone else. So, I’ll let them have this one. They might be wrong, but I’ll keep spinning From Here To Infirmary long after they're dead.

Artist: Title Fight

Title: Shed

Release: May 3, 2011

Label: SideOneDummy Records

Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube

I was in my early twenties in 2011. Now, I’m in my thirties and that time of my life feels foggy and distant. I was living in a house with friends and flatmates. My first serious relationship had slowly disintegrated into an amicable split. I was working an awful office job that stunted my intellectual curiosity and subsumed my life to the kind of business ontology that often plagues people of my generation.

We often talk about certain albums as being of a particular ‘time and place’; the sonic equivalent of a “You had to be there” moment. Unless you were the victim of a very special set of circumstances, privy to the emotional access and vantage point of a particular era and location, then things just won’t quite ‘click’ for you. Buyer beware, your experience may vary, etc.

Shed, the debut full-length from Pennsylvanian punk rock quartet Title Fight is one of these records. Listening to Shed now, at a remove of a full decade or more from my introduction to the group, it feels like a lightning bolt of nostalgic revelry. A whirlwind, foot-tapping trip down memory lane, complete with full-throated sing-a-longs, stage dives, and impassioned lyricism.

Shed abounds with punk rock meditations on time and growing up. Opener “Coxton Yard” bristles with double-time rhythms and angular, post-hardcore riffs, as dual vocalists guitarist Jamie Rhoden and bassist Ned Russin trade shouted lines about isolation, “feeling like a bag of bones,” and the spiritual shift that occurs in the transition from your teens to adulthood.

The album’s title track sounds like a youngblood Fugazi, with a devastating hook that dares to ask for conviction in a world of passing trends: “Shed your skin/ Find a better body to fit in.” The plaintive undercurrent of “Flood of ‘72” switches from temporality and the body to place and embodiment, stringing together a story of deluge and destruction that struck the band’s hometown of Kingston.

As quickly as it arrives, the nostalgic pining for the safety of “Society” and one’s hometown quickly dissipates on “You Can’t Say Kingston Doesn’t Love You.” Over a furious punk intro, Russin and Rhoden quip about the things holding them down and the things they yearn to leave behind: “What’s keeping me around?/ What’s keeping me chained down to shapes and sounds/ Your parents’ car, and your town?”

After the success of 2009’s The Last Thing You Forget compilation album, Title Fight rocketed to the front of the alternative/post-hardcore revival off the back of insane live-shows and simplistic yet raw songwriting. They travelled the world and played to thousands of young fans, many of whom came from their own Kingston’s, aching with the same curse of crippling interiority and millennial melancholy. Many were asking for more in their lives, myself included, and Title Fight had not only found it in their teens but were now tasked with giving that sense of purpose shape and form.

Recorded with producer and hardcore luminary Walter Schreifels, known for this genre-defining work in groups like Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, Quicksand, and Rival Schools, Shed pulls off the enviable balancing act of nodding to Title Fight’s many sonic influences while still managing to carve a new path forward.

The melodic passages of “Safe in Your Skin” and the gut-wrenching hook of “Where Am I?” give voice to the band’s unique sense of ennui. Listening to the latter track now, it’s obvious to me how much of Russin and Rhoden’s lyricism resonated with my early twenty-something self—stuck in the doldrums of contemporary existence, aimless and insecure—and how much it still captivates me now:

“This strange routine sometimes weighs down on me/
But I wouldn't trade it/
Not for anything.
Maybe there's nothing/
Only this moment.

As cars pass by/
Live fast or slow or stay alive.
Where am I, while you're back home/
Time goes on and on and on and on.”

Injecting energy and passion into the record’s back-end, “Your Screen Door” sparks with melodic leads that would seem at home on a Sparta album, and a punchy rhythm section courtesy of Ned’s twin brother and drummer Ben Russin.

Album standout “27” is the definitive Title Fight anthem, a straight-forward punk rock rager carried along swiftly by Russin’s shouted vocals and a thematic core that wrestles with mortality and the little superstitions that guide our way through the chaos of modern existence. The call-and-response hook (“If I said your name 27 times/ Would that bring you back to life?”) and the powerful chorus represent a young band at the height of their authenticity: driving, passionate, and powerful.

Culminating with the post-rock inflected “Stab,” that hits like The Get Up Kids covering American Football, and crunching stop-start distortions of album closer “GMT (Greenwich Mean Time),” Shed packs more into twelve tracks and 27 minutes than most career-length discographies.

Future efforts would see the group expand into the realm of indie-rock and shoegaze, but their debut remains a relic of essence and existence. For me, it’s a portal into a time in my life that, while not entirely forgotten, is nonetheless remote and inaccessible—whether through necessity or something less defined. But music is as much a vessel as anything else and I take solace in knowing that I can listen to Shed and cross that void of time and space in an instant.