Great/ Average/ Bad Bands...

[Red Hot Thumbtack In The Eye]

Why celebrate copycat bands when you can just have the original? Further, why celebrate MetalCore bands when Heavy Metal and Hardcore are still available?

[Corey_Lazarus]

Metalcore has its place. Some of the bands do it right (Shadows Fall, God Forbid has their moments), but most of them are plain old terrible. Plus, there comes a time when you may want the steady beat and simplistic heaviness of hardcore with the melody and occasional complexity of metal in one song. Tack, check out Watch Them Die. They do a cover of a Bathory song, though I forget which one, on their Century Media debut, and the few tracks I've heard from them have been pretty impressive. Decent flow from straight-forward, balls-out metal to groove-laden hardcore and then the melodic Maiden-inspired melodies and harmonies.

 

And yeah, I know about Overcast. I wouldn't have exactly called them metalcore, but more just straight-forward metal. Fair did a lot of growling for the vocalwork.

[Red Hot Thumbtack In The Eye]

Shadows Fall

 

Not MetalCore, just a modernization of some Heavy Metal styles for people with shorter attention spans.

 

Plus, there comes a time when you may want the steady beat and simplistic heaviness of hardcore with the melody and occasional complexity of metal in one song.

 

That's Thrash Metal. Real Thrash I mean. D.R.I., Cryptic Slaughter et al.

 

I did check out Watch Them Die a while back, and since they left me nothing to remember them by, I can't say it was a good thing.

[Rendclaw]

Guitar Hero got me into Burning Brides. Fun with four chords, no waiting. Like AC/DC, but much tighter.

[Corey_Lazarus]

Shadows Fall

 

Not MetalCore, just a modernization of some Heavy Metal styles for people with shorter attention spans.

So I guess I'm imagining the few chugga-chugga breakdowns in a couple of their songs, and the overall hardcore flow of quite a few of their songs. Yeah, I must be. Definitely the most metal of the popular metalcore bands, but I'd still label them metalcore. I refer to bands like Black Label Society, Ozzy Osbourne, and Motörhead as "Heavy Metal," and they don't really fit that bill. Slayer, DRI, and SOD as Thrash Metal. Suffocation, At The Gates, and Deicide as Death Metal. And Shadows Fall doesn't really sound like any of them, but more like taking parts of them here and there. They do sound similar to Killswitch Engage, Unearth, and Lamb of God, though...who play Metalcore. There's more early In Flames than Hatebreed in the music of Shadows Fall, but that doesn't make them NOT metalcore.

Plus, there comes a time when you may want the steady beat and simplistic heaviness of hardcore with the melody and occasional complexity of metal in one song.

 

That's Thrash Metal. Real Thrash I mean. D.R.I., Cryptic Slaughter et al.

I'm talking more modern hardcore...so, pretty much, fashioncore/emocore/screamo/toughguy/etc. The kind of bullshit that the FSU loves for no real reason. That mutation of hardcore, blended with metal, begat metalcore. Or, as I like to explain it to a few people here and there that listen to metal and don't know what metalcore is, "hardcore bands that began listening to Iron Maiden."

I did check out Watch Them Die a while back, and since they left me nothing to remember them by, I can't say it was a good thing.

They're not AMAZING or anything, but in the current crop of metalcore bands they stand out a fair amount. The chugga-chugga bullshit is kept to a minimum, and the riff changes are pretty good.