Alive Or Just Breathing

I listened to this during the evening workout and the driving beat certainly kept things moving along. I don't mind some speedy guitar either but the scream-growl vocal thing just never does anything for me, and the dark-portentous lyric vibe that seems mandatory in this genre tends to make me roll my eyes. The elements of more melodic singing and lighter instrumental interludes helped with this album. At the end of the day the metalcore is just not my thing.

This stuff made a big splash in metal/alternative circles when it came out. Metal was in a weird spot at the time. Nu-metal had shat itself and lost its edge in favour of radio rock (see: Linkin Park, SOAD), and the older US bands (eg. Metallica, Slayer, Pantera) were dead in the water. The bigger metal bands at the time were Nevermore, Iced Earth, Blind Guardian, Gamma Ray, Opeth etc - European or heavy euro influence, no mainstream (or even "big alternative") interest. Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall, Trivium etc - all had promise, and the likes of Pitchfork etc took notice, but they kinda blew it imo. The idea of blending In Flames/At The Gates with Machine Head was a good one, but with these guys in charge it just all ended up sounding too soulless and *American*. It's 90% hardcore breakdown/screaming and 10% melody, when it should be more of a 50/50 mix. Eventually they discovered the other 5 strings on their guitars and a better singer (with the most metal name ever in Howard Jones), but this is... pretty meh. In all honesty, the best thing to come from this album is The End of Heartache (an easy 4/5) and the likely inspiration for Robb Flynn to snap out of it and write Through the Ashes of Empires. 3/5.

It has excellent music, and I understand that this is what metal is like, but for my taste the vocalist has gone too far in his interpretation "two volume bars" above. I consider that it is not necessary to shout excessively to make a good METAL, since you can cancel out a lot of the work of the musicians and the lyrics. 2 1/2 stars

A solid pick, the user-added LPs could use some heavier genre selections instead of more singer-songwriter efforts. While this one definitely lacked any kind of dynamic contrast (making it a bit of a tiring listen at 45 minutes of pure loud), it did keep my head bopping and toe tapping through some bread-and-butter djent riffs. While not a perfect artistic statement, it was entertaining and enjoyable which is exactly what I needed today.

Rating: 6/10 Best songs: Life to lifeless

Yawn

Metalcore is just a bit too heavy for me. Though, this succeeded to met me listen it while, without the urge to turn it off

Nothing special

Musically this is quite good, but I can't deal with that style of vocal. It's actually distracting from the rest of the music. Thanks for submitting it though. Many of these user submitted albums are just so one note, and this really stands out by comparison.

This wasn’t the best choice for me today as I wasn’t really in the mood… so there’s that. Interesting that in the 90s/2000s we heard a lot of this sort of metal that mixes Grover-style screaming with borderline-Christian-rock pure vocals. I did appreciate that these songs seemed to be more positive than I expected. Overall, though, this was not working for me today.

Once in a while, I really love a good metalcore song. (It doesn't really matter which one, since they all tend to sound the same.) I pump my fists and rock along. However, a whole album of metalcore just gets both grating and monotonous to me. I just think about how much the singer probably needs a cough drop.

👎🏻

sigh, how edgy