Skinny jeans, skate shoes and shirts that are too small do not make for a talented band. That is, unless you are signed to Solid State, Victory or Facedown records. Being the fan of hard and heavy music that I am, I was on social media and following the posts of Solid State Records as they went on a spree of posting album covers from their catalog. I followed with the intent of looking for albums that I personally own, until I realized that every single band posted was labeled as "Metalcore." Other than a couple of bands on Solid State's roster, this is the only genre that they produce. This leads one to ponder other labels that cater to the Jesus-metal enthusiast. For fans of the more traditional styles of metal, one must be willing to dig through the layers of detritus and garbage that is marketed as "music." Short of extensive research or a working knowledge of the Christian metal scene, one must rely on record labels and their rosters, fanzines, and podcasts. The problem is that the Christian metal community is so small that any new trend tends to wipe out the previous wave completely. In order to stay relevant, record labels, fanzines and podcasters must follow these trends religiously just to stay in business. Meanwhile, Roxx Records, Retro-Active Records, and Bombworks Records are doing the best that they can to offer variety and stay afloat.
In early 1992, grunge replaced glam (hair) metal as the trendy music of the next generation. This forced metal back underground, and almost killed the entire genre. Grunge pushing metal underground for a decade was beneficial in hindsight. This move made fans and musicians alike reevaluate what metal is and its place in society as a relevant form of artistic expression and entertainment. The benefit of hindsight has also given me an understanding for why people like Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain, and Eddie Vedder hated the glam metal scene. There were so many bands that looked, acted, and sounded alike that there was no form of real expression or individuality left. Even the harder edged thrash scene that spawned giants like the Metallica, Megadeth, Testament and Exodus, had their own problems with over-spawning and exceeding the saturation limits possible for an industry. While the problems with thrash were not as big as glam, it was still too packed to breathe freely. Such is the case with metalcore.
Metalcore began as an underground movement in the mid-90's and has it's roots in extreme metal like death-metal and thrash while equally pulling influence from the hardcore punk scene. In the early 2000's metalcore exploded out of the underground spawning bands like As I Lay Dying, Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall, and Demon Hunter. Essentially, metalcore consists of growled or barked vocals, heavy drop-tuned guitars, fast double-bass drumming and melodically sung choruses. Gone is the virtuosity and spontaneity of thrash, the fun of glam, or the brutal riffing and frenetic pace of death-metal. Metalcore has devolved into a scream verse-sing chorus-scream verse-blastbeat/breakdown-chant bridge-sing chorus formula. While the lyrics tend to be more introspective than the aforementioned genres, they still retain that whiny gloominess that nu-metal brought but with a more positive spin. The end result is a music style that cannot grow or expand beyond its own boundaries. This is not to say that metalcore as a sub-genre and movement within the metal community is devoid of influence.
Metal-core has influenced other styles of music. This influence can primarily be seen in the labeling of newer sub-genre's. Besides the labeling of the style followed by the word "core" the music does have it's own spinoffs. For instance, there is now deathcore, grindcore, groovecore and mathcore. It would seem that the record labels are so desperate to seem hip and cool that they have added "core" to just about everything in an attempt to legitimize the existence of any given sub-genre. Genius. The album art is no exception, while the graphics and fonts of different styles of metal tend to follow their particular sub-genre, metalcore is all over the place. They have incorporated all the different styles of graphics into a blender, gave it a spin and dumped the contents on a canvas. Like the music, the album art is just as confused and contrived.
What the next big thing will be is anyone's guess, but with critical-mass achieved by metalcore, it must be somewhere on the horizon. Will the next trend be a swing back to pop infused punk, or hard rock with pop sensibilities? Will it be a simplified, stripped down style of rock n' roll or industrial fuzed with dance? Will it be something completely new? In the meantime, while we watch and wait, I would suggest that new bands who are trying to break in to the current metal scene change their genre's names to Hair-core, Traditional-core, Prog-core or Power-core to seem more "with-it" and keep up with the trends. After all, metal is just not as legit as metalcore.
