Review Summary: A 25-minute exercise in aural excrement.
Over the years I’ve come to discover something I refer to as “the deathcore effect.” Any time a new deathcore album shows any signs of musical progression, innovation, or at the very least, functioning brain activity within the band, another deathcore release comes around and shatters all hope of growth within the genre. For example, this year
Carnifex released
Die Without Hope: the best sounding album of their career and a step in the right direction for the band. Not a great album by any means but it showed the maturation of a previously terrible band, and that’s always a good thing. A month later,
Emmure’s
Eternal Enemies came out and made eternal enemies of anyone expecting to hear good music. Later the same month,
Whitechapel demonstrated some of the tightest songwriting the subgenre has to offer on
Our Endless War – again, nothing spectacular; just a refreshing, heavy as hell album you could bang your head to for about an hour. But lo and behold, the cycle continues as Black Tongue has released what can only be described as a 25-minute exercise in aural excrement – a genre-defining album in the worst sense of the phrase. It’s a culmination of everything wrong with the subgenre, and everything wrong with metal in general, jam-packed into a loathsome half-hour; pouring fuel on the fire to the stereotype that deathcore is a pimple in the asshole of the modern music industry.
Musically, not much has changed since the band’s harrowing debut EP
Falsifier. It’s more of the same – more breakdowns, more pig squeals, more distortion, and more heaviness all around. Black Tongue make the most out of
Born Hanged’s brief runtime by dragging out every breakdown to a snail’s pace, composing songs out of less than a handful of riffs that seem never-ending. Intro “Foreshadow” is truly a foreshadowing of the grave things to come. The vocalist shouts some incomprehensible nonsense before leading into the album’s first real song, aptly described by its title: “Waste”. The band executes a passable coherent thought on “Blight”, when the guitarists temporarily wake up from their autopilot droning of 3-note chugs and manage to play a riff using more than their index finger. This allows the drummer to lay down some double bass for a few moments before falling back into the brodown-riddled nonsense that comprises the rest of the EP. “Coma” has a pleasantly dense atmosphere halfway through the track that goes hand-in-hand with the plodding breakdown tempo, but it certainly isn’t worth enduring the monotonous trance you’re put into by the rest of the song. Any time the album gains any semblance of momentum, it’s squandered by sheer laziness in songwriting.
Black Tongue is somewhat of a deathcore anomaly in that they’re so wrapped up in the hardcore “fuck this shit” attitude of the scene that they come across as a complete parody of it. The sad part of it is, it’s not funny. Listening to
Born Hanged isn’t so much of a listening experience as it is a test of patience:
how long can you handle the most balls-heavy drops the genre has to offer? In that sense,
Born Hanged truly is a genre-defining album, proving Black Tongue may not only be the worst band in existence, but also a tangible step-by-step tutorial on how precisely
not to make music. And for that, Black Tongue, we thank you.
