Metalcore

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Metalcore is a genre of music that mainly draws on elements from Extreme Metal and Hardcore Punk . In allusion to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal , the genre of music, which has been booming since 2003, is often equated with the umbrella term New Wave of American Heavy Metal due to the large number of American bands in this genre .

August Burns Red

Major bands of modern metalcore include Atreyu , Darkest Hour , As I Lay Dying , Unearth , August Burns Red , Caliban , Chimaira , Heaven Shall Burn , Parkway Drive , Killswitch Engage and Miss May I .

Music and attitude

Metalcore is a descendant of Hardcore Punk , which merges with the different genres of the Extreme Metal category . Although various crossover bands - who mixed their form of hardcore with elements of other musical styles - are definitely among the musical roots of metalcore, there are no hip-hop roots such as those found in Nu Metal .

Metalcore bands are often closer to metal musically, while ideologically they mostly correspond to the hardcore scene. B. with politics and personal problems, instead of the often fictional and violence-related topics of Extreme Metal. The appearance of the pendants clearly stands out from that of the metal scene : College jackets , skinny jeans and wide-cut "mesh shorts" reminiscent of short sports trousers and base caps are often worn. Overall, the clothing style appears "younger" and fashionably more modern, which means that the scene is less fashionable than in other metal dress codes. This image is partly reinforced by the fact that most of the followers come from (hardcore) punk and metal and also define themselves fashionably through the clothes that are common in these circles. Another feature of the style is a strong propensity for tattoos and piercings among the followers of the scene (often flared piercings , septum piercing , etc.).

In addition to moshing , circle pit and wall of death, capoeira or kickboxing movements, also known as violent dancing , determine the image of modern metalcore at concerts .

Origin and development

Crossover

The preparatory work for the development of Metalcore was done in the mid-1980s, when bands such as Dirty Rotten Imbeciles , Corrosion of Conformity , SOD and the Crumbsuckers first combined hardcore and metal. At that time this mixture was still called crossover, in the USA also crossover thrash and later metallic hardcore . In some groups, the influence of the thrash metal band Slayer was particularly significant, so that some fanzines also spoke of Slayercore as an independent style. Above all, old-school New York hardcore bands such as Cro-Mags , Agnostic Front and Madball used metal elements until the mid-1990s, which were often abandoned afterwards. While Biohazard were not satisfied with metal elements and even integrated hip-hop elements into their form of crossover, other bands such as Pro-Pain and Merauder played a particularly energetic version of the hardcore-metal crossover, which has been known as metalcore since the mid-1990s was designated.

"Old School" and "New School"

The next step in the development of Hardcore was the "split" into " Old School " (e.g. Agnostic Front , Sick of It All , Slapshot ) and " New School " (e.g. Earth Crisis , Snapcase , Refused ) . The "old school" is increasingly characterized by a positive-critical attitude, simple rhythms with a very high clock speed and simple grooves , while the "new school" finds itself in more complex musical fields and the lyrics mostly have negative-critical to dark content. In order to distinguish it from the experimental “New School”, many “Old School” bands again did without crossover elements and preferred the original form of hardcore punk, as it was played in the early 1980s.

"Beatdown"

A special sub-genre of the metallic hardcore or new school hardcore is the "Mosh Style", mostly also known as "Beatdown" and represented by groups like Shattered Realm and Nasty . Mosh-Core is characterized by a slower tempo beat, groove orientation and hard breakdowns with tempo changes, which are intended to animate the crowd in front of the stage to "mosh". The New York band Bulldoze is often cited as the founders of Beatdown Hardcore . Some modern beatdown groups are now adding rap parts to their music .

Melodic metalcore

As I Lay Dying

At the same time, a variety of hardcore has developed underground since the mid-1990s, which musically is very close to extreme metal, especially with influences from Scandinavian melodic death metal ( Gothenburg school ). Here you can find very fast guitar hooks , partly borrowed from Thrash Metal , paired with double-barreled, two-part melody lines as well as the typical screeching vocals . At the Gates , early Dark Tranquility and Thrash Metal icons like Slayer , but also Black Metal bands like Emperor are named as great influences and inspirations. Slayer-oriented bands like Morning Again only achieved modest notoriety in the underground , but achieved a certain cult factor in the context of the metalcore boom in the new millennium.

All of these developments ultimately resulted in the style that has been summarized under the banner of "Metalcore" since around 2003, although the name itself has been around for a long time. The majority of the metalcore bands come from the USA, the most famous bands include All That Remains , Killswitch Engage , As I Lay Dying , Parkway Drive (from Australia), Bullet for My Valentine (from Wales) and Unearth . The pioneers in the German scene are primarily bands like Caliban , Heaven Shall Burn , Callejon , Hate Squad , Fear My Thoughts , Maroon , Narziss and Neaera , who even have no problems with the word metal as a generic term for their musical work. In recent years, many bands of this genre have formed internationally as well as in Germany.

Larger music labels have also discovered this up-and-coming music genre since 2004 and so Heaven Shall Burn, Caliban and Maroon can currently be found on Century Media , while Metal Blade the Californians As I Lay Dying as well as the Münster-based Neaera and the Swiss Cataract as the draft horses of this direction in the program Has. Chimaira have switched from Roadrunner Records to Nuclear Blast . This is accompanied by a development away from the niche existence and the "phenomenon" Metalcore is brought to light by major labels .

Deathcore

Main article: Deathcore

With the rise in popularity of Metalcore, many groups formed in the early 21st century with bands such as All Shall Perish , The Red Chord and Despised Icon , which integrate considerably more elements of Death Metal into metalcore and thus a far more extreme variety of Deathcore Metalcore established.

literature

  • Steven Blush: American Hardcore: A Tribal History. Feral House, Los Angeles 2001, ISBN 0-922915-71-7 .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. Archived copy ( Memento of the original from January 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.metal-archives.com
  2. http://www.metalsucks.net/2008/05/27/exclusive-interview-with-shai-hulud-guitarist-matt-fox/
  3. Steven Blush: American Hardcore, p. 193.
  4. http://www.scenepointblank.com/reviews/bulldoze/the-final-beatdown
  5. Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / homepage.uibk.ac.at