Review Summary: Godzilla adversary cranks out Metalcore
Metalcore is one of those genres that while I love it, chances are that if your band formed sometime after my sophomore year of high school (circa 2004) that my opinion on it will be overwhelmingly negative. My heart belongs to the bands that carried the little bastard into prominence. Acts like Converge, Coalesce, Botch, and The Dillinger Escape Plan; not the fashionistas prancing around your local fairgrounds every summer on the Warped Tour. Poland's Mothra continue on with the unabashed urgency of the aforementioned bands, and do their part in not being a carbon copy of their influences by bringing a healthy dose of groove and sludge to their semi-technical Metalcore backbone.
Their latest release, the 27 minute
Dyes EP, begins with the jagged "Squant". Vocalist Egon Warynski's burly-man howl clashes against the violent riffing and cascading drums in a dissonant riff-stravaganza that hearkens back to Metalcore's halcyon days. Mothra's obvious sludge metal influence comes to the forefront on "Octarine" with its down-tempo meandering. As the plodding down-tuned chords climax in the chorus, it's hard not to be reminded a bit of Harvey Milk. Both the sludgy side and the Botch influenced side on the album's closer. Split into two parts, "Fullgin" is a beast. Drummer Daniel Szwed beats his kit like mad man as guitarist Pawel Stefan Rosiak navigates through a mine field of angular leads before things slow down in the track's second half.
Even though Mothra bring their A game for most of
Dyes, there is one place where it falters. "Hooloovoo" is too familiar for it's own good. While not a bad song, it fails to distance itself enough from every other chug-chug-neener-neener song to have been released in the last decade. Normally this wouldn't be too much of an issue, but with only 6 songs it makes it harder to look over.
All in all, Mothra is a refreshing slice of the Metalcore pie. It's heavy, powerful, and pissed off, and stays far away from the Swedish Melo-death rip offs and breakdown whores that give the genre a bad name. And to their credit, the normally tacky hidden track at the end of the disc is a Terrorizer cover. How bad
ass is that?!
