I honestly think that my generation might be the first to be brought up on music that we would later detest, feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong. Most people my age grew up on a diet of Nu-Metal, Metalcore and Pop Punk/ Emo, all hated genres in the more serious Metal community. Thankfully I’ve grown out of a lot of these, well I say grown out what I mean is I don’t care for it any more. Get me really drunk though and I’ll party to Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit and MCR and I’ve even got tickets to the upcoming Green Day tour because I’ve never seen them and they got me into music. Basically, what I’m trying to say is there is a deep-seated irony about this music and it’s fun to let loose and listen to in certain settings, sitting at home and trying to take Mudvayne seriously though is never going to be a good time.
So why am I waffling about such awful genres? Well, it’s because today we’re talking about another hated genre, Deathcore. Most specifically the band Depths Of Hatred. Formed in 2009 and hailing from Canada the band haven’t really garnered any acclaim. Now though they’ve been picked up by Prosthetic Records for the release of their third full length Inheritance. Often a milestone that sees bands sink or swim it’s surely an important one for the band. Although Deathcore and me have a strange history, sometimes I love it and other times I loathe it, how does this one pan out?
Enslaved Through Lineage comes in with some strikingly generic Deathcore instrumentation, breakdowns and melodic passages finally give way to something more ominous and then bang! It’s straight in with the vocals, again pretty traditional in style and range for the genre, basically imagine if Trivium were a Deathcore band. Now that might sound really dreadful but from a certain nostalgic standpoint it adds can add a level of enjoyment (I guess), that said if you weren’t brought up on a diet of terrible Metalcore then man this is going to make you sad. Sadistic Trials isn’t much better, in fact it might be a bit worse, the cleaner vocals are very Metalcore and sure it’s catchy but this music really does very little for me nowadays. Pulsating Rhythm gets a bit more aggressive but the vocals are tainted with Hardcore flourishes, the kind that are too much to ignore really. Again the clean vocals make me feel like I’m listening to BFMV or Slipknot and I could really do without that. If you had given me this album ten years ago I’d have probably fallen in love with it, and to its credit it is well written for this kind of music, I’m just afraid that this is a little too tame a brand of Deathcore for myself, especially when we live in an age of Infant Annihilator, Mental Cruelty and so forth. Continuing my disdain though, that opening riff for Drop Of Red might as well be pulled straight from a Pop Punk band, I mean come on.
If I was tired of this album two songs in then imagine how I am at seven! At least The Gift Of Consciousness is a predictable interlude, a pointless one but it’s a break from the rest of the record for which I’m thankful for. Shivers gets us right back into the plains of the generic Metalcore though, I’m so tired of this. Instrumentally it’s all riffs we’ve heard before but they are well performed. Looking at this through the eyes of a Metalcore fan it’s really quite striking, but for people like me who don’t like the genre it offers very little. As the album begins to round things off with The End Of Ourselves and Emerging As One I breathe a sigh of relief, I’m all for adding in clean vocals but not like this.
So, I think it’s pretty clear what I thought of this album, right? Correct, I did not enjoy it. I’m not going to throw a fit and say that ‘it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard’ or anything like that because that would be stupid. At the end of the day, it’s Metal. Granted it’s a subgenre which I don’t care for (well the Metalcore elements at least) but that doesn’t make it awful, to some this will be incredible and honestly I can see the qualities of a band who know their craft in this record, it’s just not for me, that’s all.
(3/10 George Caley)
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