What’s exactly happening on this album cover? It looks like it should be a template for one of those edgy skull memes that say things like “Pissed off? Good. Don’t mess with me or I’ll pound six Red Bulls and make you my MMA punching bag for the day.”, all while Five Finger Death Punch plays in the background. All jokes aside, this album is arguably one of the most brutal, soul-crushing, smash a lamp over your head kind-of heavy albums I have ever heard. Please don’t smash a lamp over your head, but it would be pretty metal honestly.
Signs of the Swarm came up huge with this one and showed their progression as a band since their debut album, Senseless Order. This album crushes your ears with blast-beats, gutturals lower than your GPA, and chugs that would make even a professional beer drinker jealous. CJ McCreery has shown improvement since the last record and has lows on-par with some of the deathcore staples like Dickie Allen, Alex Terrible or Phil Bozeman. The band as a whole is very talented as well, the drums are very technical and mixed extremely well on the record, alongside the guitars which, of course, are tuned nice and low.
Starting off, “Cesspool of Ignorance” opens the feel for the whole album with some quiet harmony being played before the rest of the band joins in, and brings us right into the slam we all came here for in the first place.
The first time I heard this track, it was via “Slam Worldwide” on YouTube and I simply could not fathom any vocalist sounding the way McCreery does. They sounded kind of, it sounds strange to say, but wet. Like water being violently sucked down a garbage disposal filled with phlegm. I may have grimaced a bit while typing that honestly. Anyways the song itself proves to be a great opener and segways into the next track “The Failed Breed”. 20 seconds in and I already wanted to start kicking stuff over around me, these slams go so hard and this one was very notable.
The following songs pretty much fill out that slamming deathcore sound Signs of the Swarm has grown to be famous for, and pushed the boundaries in terms of heaviness that I have yet to find a lot to compare it to, slam-wise. Feel free to find something heavier and call me out, but this album just continually melts my face every time I play through it. “Cowards Deathbed”, “Embedded in Fear”, “Final Phase” and “Nightcrawler” were all standout tracks compared to the rest, which still slammed, don’t get me wrong, but these tracks had some seriously fantastic moments that really curate a sound and tone that is true to the first S.O.T.S. record, while also showcasing their progression and evolution into a textbook definition of slamming deathcore. One point of criticism would be “Guided Into Serenity”, the instrumental track just prior to “Nightcrawler”. It doesn’t feel right with the rest of the album’s tracks, and sort-of stands out as a large derivative from the brutal songs before and after. The main guitar melody sounds like something a high school metal band would come up with inside a garage after school. S.O.T.S. had a huge opportunity to showcase their deathcore prowess without CJ McCreery gurgling over them, and disappointed when placed next to the rest of the tracks that made this album such a pleasure to listen to. The last guitar melody that fades out and reappears in “Nightcrawler” is super sick though.
Personally, I enjoy all types of metal and I understand the backlash from old-timer metalheads towards a lot of these ’core’ sub-genres. However, this record does a fantastic job in terms of our higher quality sound and production compared to Senseless Order even. Even compared to some newer records, this album is masterfully mixed. Oceano’s Incisions is a great example of this, it’s a solid record but the production is just awful, and it was only released in 2009. The Great Misdirect by Between the Buried and Me was released the same year, and the production is nearly perfect. But BTBAM is a whole separate area of metal we’ll get into another time. As much as production can be a knit-picky thing with music, it’s hard for me to ignore how great this album sounds, even if you can’t stand the type of music S.O.T.S. crafts. Hate on deathcore all you want, but this is an extremely solid album with some textbook slams to get you all nice and hyped up while an extremely talented and upcoming band drops the slam hammers on us.