The Stings of Conscience

It's becoming increasingly easy for hardcore bands to pass as metal bands these days. Though they might adhere to all their genre's clichés, they can still run with the modern metal crowd by throwing in some harmony lead melodies, up-tempo "thrash" passages, and thickly distorted downtuned guitars. Enter Unearth, another shameless metalcore clone making it big by riding the coattails of Shadows Fall. The first in what will likely be a series of modern albums I'm going to shit upon, The Stings of Conscience only adds fuel to the fire of dissent against this kind of garbage, palatable only to -core fans and indigestible to everyone with a decent taste in music, modern or otherwise.

If you've ever listened to modern hardcore (not the original hardcore punk), you've heard Unearth's debut already. Every cliché is milked to its fullest potential and then some. Dissonant treble riffs. Screamo vocals. Whiny lyrics. Double bass ad nauseam. Way too many breakdowns. Only the clean-riff emo passages are left mercifully) out of their formula. So how is this a metal album, or metalcore even? Well they rip off Shadows Fall a whole lot. Harmonized riffs abound, as well as lead melodies. No actual solos of course, though the guitarists go through great lengths to convince the listener otherwise. Often these lead melodies will last for a significant length of time, even over vocals, to give you the impression that they're a bona fide guitar solo. But it's just the same thing repeated over and over, none more obnoxious then the lead part near the end of "One Step Away," which just screams "yeah we play hardcore, but we can sweep pick, so we're metal." Take into account the formulaic songwriting and lack of catchy...well, catchy anything really, and you have an album no one would want to listen to twice.

Fans of hardcore/metalcore will think differently I'm sure, but I find virtually no unique aspects to this. Unless you really like Shadows Fall clones, avoid this and listen to musicians that have their own identity.