Deep Cuts #08: Poison The Well – 'The Opposite of December...'
And the Floridian birth of metalcore's titantic second wave.
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.
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.