New Music Report – October 1, 2021
We’re really getting into album release season now and things are starting to heat up. There are tons of INCREDIBLE albums coming out during the remainder of this year, and this week is a perfect example of the strength and diversity of these releases. There’s so much going on here from nonsense mathcore to ex-Attack Attack fever dream post-hardcore, and some new Converge and Devil Wears Prada thrown in for good measure, and I love it so much. So, check out everything if you can, there’s sure to be something for everyone.
Frontierer – I’ve said this a few times over the years, probably cause I listen to a lot of mathcore, but I’ll say it even strong for this one: This album is pure chaos. Oh my god, absolutely nothing makes sense here, it’s just absolute nonsense from start to finish and I love every second of it. Mathcore has lots of weird little subsets, where sometimes it seems very calculated, and sometimes it’s absolute destruction, and this sort of resides somewhere in the middle. Where everything on this album feels incredibly deliberate, but deliberately created from a mind that makes absolutely no sense. All while avoiding the trap of being chaos just for the sake of chaos, which isn’t always an easy thing to do with this sound. They manage to make this crazy mess of dissonance intelligent and captivating, while still being difficult to pick out a groove. It’s a hell of an experience, and I highly recommend it to any fans of mathcore, djent, just about any sort of nonsense that people are calling music.
Dying Wish – What an incredible surprise this album was. Dying Wish has been causing some stirs in the scene for a bit now, including a recent stint on the road with some all-time favorites of mine, Silent Planet. But as is often the case, until you really have a full sample size of what to expect from a band that you can really only get from a debut full length. It made me really cool off on my Spiritbox hype, and subsequently made me turn up the Dying Wish hype considerably. This album is nothing short of fantastic. It’s incredibly gritty, screamo-y metalcore, jumping on the current wave of screamo-reemergence and capitalization on nostalgic sounds and styles from the early-00s. And I’m kinda blown away by that whole movement cause most of the time that sort of thing feels too forced, but so many of these bands, Dying Wish included, are doing it so, so well. It’s familiar, but still their own sound, and executed on such a level that you rarely see from debut albums except from truly special bands.
Wage War – To put it simply, the last Wage War album was terrible. It was really just basic, boring, pseudo-radio-friendly metalcore. It lacked focus, substance, and really the passion or their previous album. So, I didn’t really have high hopes for this new album, I was really expecting it to be more of the same, just another album where they phoned it in so they could get some plays on Sirius XM. The singles leading up to this album gave me a bit more hope, but I still wasn’t expecting a ton. And I will say, the results are much better than I was expecting. In fact, it might just be their best album yet. Still not groundbreaking, it’s still mostly generic metalcore, but still pretty solid generic metalcore. And for what it’s worth, being generic isn’t really the worst thing in the world, not every band is going to set out to redefine the genre, some are just out there to make a specific, existing style of music, and make it as good as they can. And that’s exactly what Wage War did here, and I’m into it.
Singles/Albums – Full of Hell (LP, Deathgrind), The Devil Wears Prada (Metalcore), Converge/Chelsea Wolfe/Stephen Brodsky (Sludge/Metal/Post-Metal), Shadow of Intent (Deathcore), Bilmuri (EP, Post-Hardcore), Explosions in the Sky (LP, Post-Rock/Soundtrack), Archspire (Progressive Metal), Mastodon (Metal), Trivium (Metal)