Whitechapel - Mark of the Blade (2016)

Mark of the Blade is at once a celebration of many of the bases touched upon by previous Whitechapel albums, and sort of a mixed bag that signifies they're not quite sure where they want to go or who they want to be right now. That's not to say it's a bad record, necessarily, because even as someone who has rarely enjoyed any of their output, I thought that this hit enough of a quote of entertaining moments to dub it one of their better efforts. But the bulk of the material here definitely seems like it's simultaneously exploratory and constantly looking backwards, trying to flesh out ideas they might not have taken to their natural conclusions in the past, yet not willing to go far enough to make them stick.

Production is total brickhouse, with a mixture of thrashy melodeath rhythm guitars that feed into fat-bottomed grooves which themselves teeter between the djent and deathcore niches, without much resolution as to which side of that fence they're going to land on. The bass guitar has this enormous, bouncy tone which you can really feel in your stomach when they bust into the meathead hardcore breakdowns, almost like some heavily tatted GQ dudes are lining up to use your gut as a trampoline for their fists. But they also go for some brief, intimate moments like the intro to "Bring Me Home" where they're attempting to show off their sensitive side, clean guitar sounds and soothing vocals and a progression which almost reminded me of Tool or A Perfect Circle before the requisite clobbering rhythms begin. Tremolo picked melodies are often added as layers beneath the dense, roiling strata of mosh-oriented violence to add a little bit of a post-modern feel to the brocore step that they're often pretty loyal to, and the hoarse and antagonistic vocals of Phil Bozeman definitely sound as angry as I've heard in the past, especially in the lyrics to songs like "Tormented" or "Elitist Ones" where they definitely have a Hatebreed-like social hardcore aesthetic with even a little hip-hop or Biohazard to the syllable choices.

Hell, along with the pork-toned bass in the latter, it's quite funny to the point that I broke out laughing...but you wouldn't wanna get run down by these dudes in an alley regardless. Neither would I. The joke would be over then, as they beat me within an inch of never reviewing a deathcore band again. But yeah, there are lots of little deviations here or there where the aggression will cut out and they'll launch into something which feels progressive by comparison, and that actually creates an air of nuance to what they've recorded here. I can't accuse Whitechapel of not trying to write actual songs, or not trying to better themselves, because I feel like they're doing both. It's whether or not the riffs or the lyrics resonate with me here that matters, and to my chagrin, they really did not. Not for a lack of effort, though, and to their credit, they've done a far better job with this than their shoddy last album, Our Endless War, while still flirting with the more accessible goals of that album and then mixing 'em up with the 'classic' 2007-2010 era and a bit of the finesse of the self-titled disc (which remains my favorite). Hell, my 3-year old was going mental to this shit, jumping up and down on our futon and did a somersault or two into other nearby furniture. So...that there is something. Not a lot. But enough.

Verdict: Indifference [6.25/10]

http://www.whitechapelband.com/

Whitechapel - Our Endless War (2014)

Try as they might to cultivate a distinct personality with their 5th album Our Endless War, Knoxville deathcore champions Whitechapel seem to repeatedly slug themselves into unconsciousness with a stock set of hybrid deathcore/djent grooves that immediately shit all over the fact that this is otherwise a fairly rounded, patient set of tunes with some genuine notion of songwriting and atmosphere. In fact, this might just be one of the most 'accessible' of deathcore's major league outings to date, with the caveat that they largely avoid the shitty emo pop chorus parts that have crept their way into the niche via its metalcore foster home. I can say that I feel like Whitechapel actually sat back after their last album, their most technical and progressive to its day (and coincidentally the first I liked...if barely) and then came up with the idea to redefine/simplify themselves akin to what Mastodon did with The Hunter, or Metallic did with The Black Album. What I can't say is that I enjoy it, because I do not.

The bedrock beneath this record is the djent-ish methodology of the guitar tuning and performance, which cycles through a number of tough guy grooves that wouldn't have been out of place on an Emmure record, but that occasionally strike out into a more purely deathcore variety of slamming, or even a spin on some of the neo-thrash we were starting to hear in the later 90s, which took its influence fully from Slayer's garbage phase or Pantera rather than the more inspirational material of the 80s. There are plenty of blast beats and uptempo passages, but these are often affixed with some of the most banal palm mute chugging of their career. The atmospheric melodies, cleaner guitars (as in the intro "Rise") or other techniques they mix into the formula might seem a tasty distraction for a few seconds, but inevitably they are drawn through gravity back to the most boring and contrived of riffing sequences possible, almost all of which are irritably familiar and lifted to some slight modification from various hardcore, metalcore and groove metal sources. There are still a few proggy inclinations to how some of the drums pan out (the best part of the album, in my opinion), like how they'll splash some bluesier harmonies over those Meshuggah/Special Defects jazz melodies of yesteryear to create some depth, but this is unfortunately not so compelling as it might have been.

The guitars have a reliable, stomach punching tone to them which is anchored by the fat but often difficult to notice bass guitar; however, this drummer goes so unerringly ballistic through so much of the 40 minutes here that he seems to leave the remainder of the players in his wakes. Fills flying everywhere, a good rich mix to the toms and kicks, Ben Harclerode is so consummately talented and professional that at the very least, this record could serve as his try-out reel for a far more important band one day. Not that the other players here lag so far behind that they don't deserve some notice, but the creativity of the chugging is unanimously vacant, and Phil Bozeman's vocals are just so vapidly Anselmo-Jasta-HWAAAAHHH that I barely felt the sustained growls trailing off them. Way too 'tough guy', only like so many of these expendable metalcore/deathcore front men, there is no charisma. I'm sure the guy has his demons, they/we all do, but I couldn't pick them out of a lineup of post-Earth Crisis mosh pilots over the course of the last 20 years, and of course I was just so bored by the music that Diamanda Galas singing over it couldn't have made a difference.

But by far the WORST part of this album would be the lyrics, which are more or less an endless fucking tirade of tired cliches that most angst-ridden tweens pen for their garage bands. 'Just let it go...', 'Fall to your knees', 'Our bodies full of scars', 'This is our way of life'...it's like the songs are all meant to be a part of this Hardcore Self-Affirmation 101 Playbook that aims to justify the band's existence, like it's really them against the world or something, kicking ass on tour and bein' rock stars! No guys, you're not rebels, you play trendy heavy -core music with nary a shred of individuality. Low-hanging fruits plucked from the altar of mediocrity. I'm sure it's all really heart felt (like angina), but what could be more lazy and boring? This album felt so earnestly and desperately bland to me that I almost wonder what I heard in its predecessor, which must have just been a fluke. Our Endless War even looks the part of forgettable, and I think ultimately I liked this one even less than the new Carnifex, which was another step backwards for a potentially promising band. There are exponentially worse albums in this style/these styles, but I sure feel no compulsion to visit this one further.

Verdict: Fail [4.5/10]

https://www.facebook.com/whitechapelmetal

Whitechapel - Whitechapel (2012)

Tennessee's Whitechapel could hardly be called my favorite band in the deathcore spectrum. Not that I spend an inordinate amount of time mining the prospects in that particular strata, but their past output has been more or less a poster child for all the vapid, derivative grooving, shallower hardcore lyrics and uninspired vocal abuse tailor made for little more than teenaged moshing and high school strife. Enter their eponymous fourth full-length Whitechapel, and truth is once being hammered into that age old cliche 'every dog has its day'; for while it still retains some of the traits and flaws that critically marred my appreciation of its forebears, this album prances straight out the gates of the puppy pound and takes a big old, chocolaty dump on my sneaker-boots.

As with their contemporaries like Carnifex or Job For a Cowboy, I got a real sense from this music that Whitechapel felt an aching desire to expand itself into something more progressive. Evolutionary. Epic. And what I'm hearing from this album translates that intent into some admittedly intelligent and well implemented designs that, while not enough to concoct a masterpiece, are enough to quash its predecessors by an order or so of magnitude. Whitechapel is an album of 'moments' more than a fully-fleshed out experience. There were a good number of palm muted, chugging mosh rhythms strafing both the metalcore and djent genres that I felt ruefully unimpressed with, but where these guys deserve some credit is in how they pepper the aggression with ear sweetening leads, progressive metal leanings and what some might dub 'experimentation'. Not that their earlier albums were entirely void of minor escapes and nuances, but the 38 minute duration of this album is incredibly well balanced between the puerile brutality and something...more.

That 'more' is, itself, spread among the stars of possibility. You get some calming pianos in the intro to "Make It Bleed", before some intense surgical thrashing ensues; or strewn throughout "Devoid". There are slight passes at electronica/noise like the intro "(Cult)uralist" and "Section 8". Though a good portion of the album's grooves are directed at the sort of ballistic timekeeping present on the older albums, they are almost constantly including some little tremolo picked fusion guitar melody or other atmospheric distraction to create a depth that otherwise would have been lost upon the concrete foundation. The grooves themselves are often contrasted between Meshuggah-like jerking and the Earth Crisis/Slayer breakdowns that death- and metalcore were partially hatched from, though you can also experience some aggressive post-hardcore dissonance (check out "Section 8" which flirts with all three of these paradigms).

But more, you're getting a similar taste of the highly technical, modern riffing and soloing inherent to the younger Californian brutal death acts, and they've clearly sharpened their individual musicianship. The band has three guitarists, and they USE them, whether in tripling up the rhythms for a fat, pummeling excess or gauging off dual melodies against the third. The single major setback to the album would be the lyrics and vocals. The latter are decent enough when roving thuggishly along a guttural axis, but the various Deicide snarls and tough guy gang shouts used to complement them are less than complimentary. What's worse, while the music is far more cerebral and stimulating than past jaunts, the lyrics are still held back in that 8th grade hardcore mentality, where the world is all out to get you and you must battle it with the cliched script of social antipathy. Lots of 'lies', 'falling', 'bleeding', and 'fuck' as if I were listening to some second rate wrist-cutter metalcore demo from 1994.

I would LOVE for this band to attempt some poetry, using more interesting symbolism, abstraction, surreality, or even just a more technical vocabulary to streamline with their rhythmic chops. I realize that to some degree these guys are writing for their younger audience, who can appreciate a violent lift-up when he or she has been dumped by society or a significant other, or stabbed in the back by a former 'friend', but as the band ages, I think they should spit some more progressive wisdom in that microphone. But beyond this glaring distraction, I must admit that Whitechapel is entertaining more often than not. You could pull 3-4 songs off this thing in almost any order and come out with a far stronger listening session than the older albums combined. I also like the minimal approach to the cover. The information age, dystopic horrors of the past records weren't bad, and sawblades are nothing necessarily novel, but I like that it doesn't show or tell me anything, it just implies progress. It makes me want to dig deeper.

All told, this is a vast improvement in most departments. 2012 and the Metal Blade roster is full of surprises. First that Six Feet Under record, and now this? There are probably some Whitechapel fans who will find this less appealing due to its implicit variation, who don't give a shit about hearing the band challenge itself, they just wanna mosh. Plenty of that here for the dude-bros, but honestly, it's high time to grow up: something this Southern sextet has done nicely with this very album. I'll try not to track dog poo all over the rug on my way out the door.

Verdict: Win [7/10]

http://www.facebook.com/whitechapelmetal

Whitechapel - Recorrupted EP (2011)

There is certainly no love lost between myself and anything this Tennessee deathcore act has released to date, and with their new stopover EP, Recorrupted, I'm afraid the abject loathing must continue. This is not something meant to be so seriously, as it largely features remixes and a cover song, but regardless I found it to be weaksauce to the nth degree. A disheveled and disjointed teaser for whatever the band is planning next in the full-length realm, straight from the vaults of Metal Blade, who always seem to ply their fingers along the genuine, trendy pulse of extreme music.

In fairness, there are some elements to the sole new original track that, "Section 8" that I was not completely turned off by. After the obligatory ambient/electro lead-in we get a huge, guttural growl that heralds a multi-layered mesh of pumping djent grooves, dissonant industrial metal dressing and droning air raid picking melody. But within the span of a minute, we've already relapsed into some boring drudge of muted groove chugs which bounce along like faux dreadlocks at a Korn gig, pants so baggy that even when they jump da fuc up they're still dragging on the discarded butts, rolling papers and abandoned gig flyers. There is a particular, mechanical resonance that Whitechapel graft to this song that I thought showed some promise, and a nice dual lead melody that slices through its midsection like a plastic surgeon curbing a midriff, but in general I found that there were no memorable riffs throughout, it just sort of bludgeons along into its own grooving oblivion.

Hey, at least it's better than everything else on this EP... The cover of Pantera's "Strength Beyond Strength" manages to make the tracks inherent, ball-fisted mosh break into something dull and methodical. The 'Big Chocolate remix' of "Breeding Violence" seems as hackneyed as a lot of those old Fear Factory techno mixes. Lots of distorted, yawning Skrillex-like aesthetics and some noodling guitar melodies applied for texture. The Ben Weiman remix of "This is Exile" is mildly less annoying, as it takes a more mathematical application, but it feels like something Justin Broadrick would have left on the cutting room floor rather than add to some Godflesh compilation. And lastly, the Tennessee boys show their sensitive side, with an acoustic rendition of "End of Flesh" (these are all from their most recent album A New Era of Corruption). This is instrumental, and not bad as background noise, but neither is it remotely compelling.

Recorrupted is really just a bunch of odds and ends being used to tide over the deathcore fan, and many such releases (in all genres) aren't fit to scrape your boots with. I admit that I would not mind hearing Whitechapel drift further into the mechanistic industrial grooving space with their own writing on the next album, but I think it's time they ditched some of their more dull chugging breakdown sequences and attempted to vary up the vocals a bit, since they too seem like a pastiche of the trite and generic that no one will care about in a decade. Maybe a year. At any rate, I've no inbred opposition to deathcore and its variants if done well. Job for a Cowboy and even Carnifex have surprised me in the past, but I've yet to be impressed by this crew, though I can hear some latent potential slumbering inside them like a kraken on its murky leash.

Verdict: Fail [2.75/10]

http://www.myspace.com/whitechapel

Whitechapel - A New Era of Corruption (2010)

Contrary to how my feelings on most of its primary progenitors' works might cast a gloom upon the deathcore genre as a whole, I'm not internally opposed to the idea. The idea that breakdowns, youth mosh attitude and other key characteristics to hardcore or metalcore could be incorporated into death metal music is hardly a long shot. Death metal and its own parent genre thrash were loaded with such things already, just...better. Deathcore seems a fairly natural successor to metalcore and its elder sibling, crossover, but the fact stands that so few artists within its confines have written anything even remotely compelling. In fact, it's sadly telling that some of the best albums in this category (like Job for a Cowboy's surprising 2007 album Genesis) are merely those that bark as straight up the pure death metal tree as possible.

Whitechapel are not an entirely talentless bunch of guys, but the stamp of quality evades them once again with their third album, and second through Metal Blade: A New Era of Corruption. This is still the same chugging three guitar onslaught you heard on their prior releases, but the content itself seems to fall well between its predecessors in both quality and style, leaning towards the mosh slop of the debut with an added meat injection of math like, bouncing grooves ala Meshuggah or other djent acts. The vocals are still pretty bleak, at best sounding like Vader or mid-period Morbid Angel, but usually just a palette of scrappy tough guy deathcore with snarls interchanged like a street youth approximation of a Deicide or Carcass. The tones are rich and thick here like any modern extreme metal album, and no expense was spared, but the actual writing falls far behind the band's impetus to craft mere mosh anthems for disheveled youth who will forget all about it six months hence, and they don't temper them with what seems like any real steel whatsoever...

Take a track like "The Darkest Day of Man", which at its apex transforms into simplistic, thrash propulsion rhythms that reminisce to the groovier elements of Swedish melodic death aspirants (err, clones) like Black Dahlia Murder, but is otherwise a bunch of tightly wound, bouncing and slamming downtuned grooves that go nowhere musically. It seems like the process on this album is to shift through a number of brickhouse dynamics without ever really pondering the riffs that could transform them into something terrifying or effective. A New Era of Corruption feels like going through all too many motions. It's mechanical and precise, but if I didn't know any better I'd say it felt like the Tennessee band were bored with this. Whereas the predecessor had slight hints of inspiration, this is pretty much all blood and sweat channeled into meaty chug rhythms ("Reprogrammed to Hate", "Prayer of Mockery", "Murder Sermon") that seem to survive only on how many kids start dancing to them. There are riffs spotting this muted landscape, but they rarely catch the ear for more than a fleeting second, and are all too quickly evaporated into mindless slogging punishment.

If you woke up this morning and decided you'd just like to do barrel rolls and lawnmower kicks down the main boulevard of your city neighborhood, then Whitechapel provides an ample soundtrack to your quick fits of violence. But the memory of such a spree is guaranteed not to endure beyond the possible manslaughter charges. This might be the best produced of the band's albums, and the lyrics maintain the more hardcore, thoughtful essence of their sophomore rather than the perverse pleasures of the debut, and Phil Bozeman's vox might actually sound a little more gruff and brutalized, but none of these traits necessarily translates into quality music, and I'm yet again striving to find the appeal. You can almost randomly select a modern brutal death metal record at large and find more appealing, interesting content, and certainly the 'core side of the equation, which here manifests through the prevalence of palm muted breakdowns, is truly void of the ideas that made for successful stylistic marriages in the past.

Verdict: Fail [3.75/10]

http://www.myspace.com/whitechapel

Whitechapel - This Is Exile (2008)

Transferring from their deal with Siege of Amida/Candlelight over to Metal Blade, the more secure home of fellow deathcore mavens Job for a Cowboy, Whitechapel returned to the millstone to churn out their sophomore This is Exile the year after their debut hit the shelves and ipods of cool kids everywhere, and its contents hit and bruised the pretty faces of many an anguished youth during the band's breakdown centric live performances. This time, no expense was spared, as the band commissioned some better artwork and had the album recorded and mastered in New England, the latter job handled by the infamous metalcore production guru Zeuss out in western Massachusetts.

Considering this, the result is pretty astonishingly similar to the debut album, with perhaps a larger flair for melodic death metal running in currents through the band's brickhouse chug off breakdowns. Some added technicality is to be expected, and thus the album is busier overall, what with the band keeping their three guitar approach to composition (that is really only felt in the leaden bottom end and full rhythm segments behind the breakaway melodies), but it still feels like a mix of the same mosh core and trendy melodic death, with vocals that once again conjure up a mix of Vader, Behemoth or Morbid Angel guttural aggression with the layered on snarls you expect from a lot of modern brutal death. The breakdowns are here, still, and very rarely any good, tending to leech away the bursts of the title track or "Exalt", the latter of which has some decent little lead licks and atmospheric touches that disappear into a wall of fist fucking djent fury.

One area in which the band have clearly improved is in the lyrics. No more will you find the sadistic sexual surgery of the debut. The band seem to have moved on to higher brow concepts like sacrilege and undead social rebellion. Granted, they can hardly be dubbed 'poetic' or even all that interesting, but it seems a little more fitting to the band's aural aesthetic. The mix here is brighter and bloodier than the debut, and perhaps more welcoming since the band have upped their melodic ante considerably. Ultimately, I feel like This is Exile is a slight step up from The Somatic Defilement. It's more thoughtful, but still pretty frustrating, with the best track being a 3 minute melodic chugging instrumental... ("Death Becomes Him") and almost everything else flipping its lid between forgettable thrusting rhythms, semi-tech showmanship and trendy beat downs. This is one dance partner you're not going to remember in the morning, regardless of what venereal ailment you've picked up.

Verdict: Fail [4/10] (in a sense I enjoy the agony)

http://www.myspace.com/whitechapel

Whitechapel - The Somatic Defilement (2007)

Whitechapel is one of the three major acts in the contemporary 'deathcore' genre here in the US, which, depending on which side of the 15 year old age barrier you fall, is either one of the most exciting or dreadful trends in all of extreme music. Not as fashionable as California's Carnifex, nor as evolutionary and intense as Arizona's Job for a Cowboy (on a good day), they seem to represent a more blue collar approach to the popular medium. Alas, this doesn't really translate into anything interesting musically, because the Knoxville brutes make most of the same mistakes as many of their less interesting peers, while adding nothing to the table that we weren't already sick of when metalcore turned from its waking, esoteric promise to insufferable pop inflected trash.

The Somatic Defilement seems to operate heavily around some of the most generic breakdowns the human mind can conceive. Breakdowns that were dated even as a seminal band like Earth Crisis or Hatebreed were taking off their training wheels. Add a pinch of math or djent metal influence (Meshuggah, specifically), slight passages of melodic death ala At the Gates, and dual grunt/snarl vocals that sound like your average overbearing tribute to early Carcass, Morbid Angel and Deicide, and let simmer for 32 minutes of dejected, which blows its load all too soon with almost all of its most potentially interesting tricks in the title track, which features several flighty death metal passages dispersed among numerous chug downs. "The Somatic Defilement" is like being teased with a death metal carrot down a shady alley only to be jumped by a pack of metalcore kids wearing huge pants and wallet chains.

This is not the only track that throws away its better seconds to a wasteland of mediocre mosh chugging. "Prostatic Fluid Asphyxiation" cycles between a decent opening volley of technical, clinical death spasms to some Meshuggah-like riffing, and then closes with an awful, hack palm mute sequence. "Fairy Fay" gives you about 10 seconds of something brisk before it too segues into the gutter, though there's a nice atmosphere as the lyrics bounce over the mutes into the bridge sequence. "Alone in the Morgue" teases us once more with its intense double bass driven old school death metal riff, sort of a mesh of Suffocation and Pestilence, but then erupts with some choppy, uninspiring riffs and guitar squeals before...you guessed it, another flatulent break down heavy on the palm muting, which completely strangles the momentum.

It's pretty unfortunate, because you can tell if these guys could stop fucking around and further some of their better ideas, they'd manifest into at least an average brutal/tech death metal outfit. Granted, that in itself is not for everyone, but personally I'd find it more compelling than what often seems a ceaseless tirade forged to sate the lowest common denominator of metal and hardcore fans; the mosh tyrant who couldn't give two shits about music, just a free chance to beat on people without spending a night in the slammer. Whitechapel do pen some pretty sadistic lyrics about molestation, murder and sexual malpractice, so in this way they're not a far cry from your typical gore or rape fantasy death metal element, with a slightly more psychotic spin, but the music doesn't even come close to building to a climax before it constantly lets you down with its shallow, vapid grooving and 'tough' sounding death/core vocals.

Verdict: Fail [3/10] (in the name of anatomy)

http://www.myspace.com/whitechapel