Review Summary: A Classic Math/Metal/Core album and a must have for fans of the genre.
Post-Hardcore? Melodic Mathcore? Pre-Deathcore? Progressive Metalcore? Or just simply a classic. As The Architecture is Still Burning was released in 2003, I’ve had some time to think about how to describe the music of Forever is Forgotten. Beautiful, angry, aggressive, cleansing, chaotic and psychotic are all words that could be used in this review, but after all these years I still haven’t found a way to corner them.
Forever is Forgotten plays a style of metalcore heavily influenced by mathcore similar to Into the Moat. Their music is filled with technical riffing, heavy breakdowns, and more switches in tempo and riffs than there are switches on those old telephone switchboards. Within the first 30 seconds of this album you’ll have heard hardcore, metalcore and mathcore influences. For a lot a bands this will result in an incoherent album of noise, random chaos and short attention spans but Forever is Forgotten makes all these switches with such ease that is keeps the music interesting and it keeps you longing for more. They have mastered the way of blending all these styles in a way similar to BTBAM.
There is only one quiet and soothing moment on this record. Halfway through it you will hear the acoustic guitars of ‘Forfeiture of Thumbs’. The other nine songs on this album, which have great titles like ‘Oh baby, pretty like a car crash’, ‘I’m glad you’re dead’ and ‘Nostradamus would have wanted it this way’, are all filled with the before-mentioned style of metalcore.
The production of this album is very solid. Vocals are not to soft and not to up front, the drums sound crisp, there is a clean guitar sound and for once the bass is not buried in the mix. Which means you can actually hear what the band is doing and that’s great because these guys will be all over your speakers.
I would love to give this album a 5, but I can’t. Even though this album incorporates every good thing about deathcore, mathcore and metalcore, it also does this in every song. This means there will be a lot of riff-other riff-breakdown-blast beat-riff-quiet part-riff-other riff-action going on. Which makes for a very overwhelming listening experience. Just listen to the first minute of ‘Choking on’ to understand what I mean. So if you’re not into bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan, Between the Buried and Me or Daughters this might not be the band for you.
In hindsight this is a must have album and it should be an influence on everything death-, metal- and math-core out there. So if you like Into the Moat, BTBAM, From a Second Story Window, It Dies Today (the EP) or Whitechapel, go check out Forever is Forgotten.
