Way of the Dead is the second studio album by Yakuza, released in 2002.[2] It marks a distinct departure from the post-hardcore of their debut, and instead displays a more experimental style, with elements of alternative metal, sludge metal, hardcore and even jazz. Some refer to their eclectic sound as "jazzcore." The second half of the album is composed entirely of the 43-minute track "01000011110011", an extended electric avant-jazz jam.
This edition of 'In Defense of the Genre' looks at the type of dark, heavy, melodic hardcore defined in the 2000s by bands like American Nightmare, Modern Life Is War, and The Hope Conspiracy, which once again is having a comeback. Five newer recommended songs are included below the list.
Hardcore Of The Dead
Melodic hardcore is not an easy thing to define. It was pioneered in the early '80s by the Descendents, who were making what now scans as proto-pop punk, but it also describes later '80s bands like Dag Nasty, who took influence from what the Descendents were doing but came out with something closer to what would become known as emocore. In the '90s, it described bands as disparate as NOFX, Lifetime, and AFI. In the 2000s, melodic hardcore experienced mainstream success thanks to bands like Rise Against and Strike Anywhere who veered towards punk and pop punk, but it was also used to describe bands like Modern Life Is War, American Nightmare, and The Hope Conspiracy, bands who were heavier and darker, but still too tuneful and emotional to qualify as beatdown hardcore or metalcore. The lines between all the hardcore-adjacent music happening during the 2000s were blurry, but since we're over a decade removed from that era, I've been looking back at the various trends through a series of subgenre-specific lists, and here's a list of 20 essential albums from the 2000s that helped shape that darker, heavier version of melodic hardcore.
You'd often find this style of hardcore on Bridge 9, Equal Vision, the now-defunct Rivalry Records, and Converge frontman J. Bannon's Deathwish Inc label, and many of them also used J. Bannon's artwork on their album covers and/or recorded with Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou. (Run For Cover started out signing this kind of stuff too, and they do again.) The chameleonic Converge are ultimately more of a metalcore band, but it makes sense that many of these bands were in Converge's orbit; they shared a dark, metallic, forward-thinking approach with Converge, but brought things back to the cathartic simplicity of early '80s hardcore. The history of everything from the Descendents to Dag Nasty to Lifetime is in these bands' DNAs, but they created a distinctly 21st century version of melodic hardcore, and it's one that continues to be explored today, with bands like One Step Closer, Time and Pressure, and Ghost Fame carrying the torch.
As with all of these subgenre lists, there may be some discrepancy as to what does and doesn't count as melodic hardcore, and surely some classics are missing, but I aimed to put together a comprehensive snapshot of the era that hopefully leads to a few new discoveries for some and a trip down memory lane for others. Read on for the list, unranked, in chronological order.
By the turn of the millennium, you had some bands trying to bring hardcore back to the sound of its '80s origins, and others pushing it in so many different directions that you couldn't really call it "hardcore" anymore. American Nightmare kind of existed right in the middle. They embraced the dark, metallic tone and goth-inspired lyricism that had been entering the punk vocabulary, but they did so in a way that honored the short, fast, and loud template that the original hardcore bands had designed. The result was something too innovative to be called a revival, and too rooted in tradition to be accused of abandoning hardcore completely. It was a new version of hardcore that a new generation of kids could call their own. Their 2001 debut album Background Music set the tone for this new sound, but their second and final pre-reunion album We're Down Til We're Underground (released when they were briefly called Give Up The Ghost due to legal issues surrounding the name "American Nightmare") perfected it. The album is dark, heavy, and whiplash-inducing like its predecessor, but it also has a warm, welcoming feeling with crisper production and a more melodic approach to the genre. Even the album artwork suggests this is an album that rejects hardcore's macho posturing. American Nightmare broke up after this album (vocalist Wes Eisold turned his attention towards his other band Some Girls, before forming the goth band Cold Cave in 2007), and they didn't return with new music for 15 years, but the impact of We're Down Til We're Underground kept growing over time. When bands like Touche Amore helped bring a new wave of hardcore outside of the genre's usual niche circles, it was obvious that American Nightmare were a core influence.
A lot of the early/mid 2000s melodic hardcore bands went under-appreciated in their time, and Connecticut's With Honor were no exception. Originally released on Hatebreed frontman Jamey Jasta's Stillborn Records in 2004, the band's debut LP did leave an immediate impact within the hardcore scene, but its reach is wider than ever today. The band recently signed to punk/hardcore powerhouse Pure Noise Records, who gave the album a long-awaited reissue (remixed and remastered by Converge's Kurt Ballou, who recorded the original LP), and before they were postponed, their upcoming reunion shows were being opened by one of today's most prominent melodic hardcore torch carriers, One Step Closer (replacement openers for the shows which are now in May are TBD). It's easy to see the through line between those two bands, and listening back to Heart Means Everything today, it doesn't sound like it's aged one bit. The album wisely eschewed the now-outdated stereotypes of popular 2000s hardcore, but its bright melodic guitars made it more tuneful than the depths of the hardcore underground. Contrasting the melodic guitars were Todd Mackey's vocals, which were always screamed -- never sung -- but done so with the kind of big-hearted emotion that was in touch with the emo-friendly side of hardcore. With Honor knew how to convey sheer aggression and still tug at the heartstrings.
Another band making a big comeback (who were also on Stillborn in 2004) is Nashville's Love Is Red, who recently broke a 17-year-silence with the genuinely great new EP Darkness Is Waiting. It's the followup to their 2004 sophomore album The Hardest Fight, an underrated classic of 2000s melodic hardcore. A contemporary Punknews review said it contained "the best parts of Good Riddance, Reach The Sky, Bane, Cave In, Stretch Arm Strong, H2O, CIV and Sick Of it All," and a long, disparate list of bands like that suggests that the reviewer knew they were hearing something new and exciting but couldn't quite put their finger on it at the time. It makes sense; at the time, Love Is Red were one of just a few bands defining this new style of hardcore, and it would take a few years before it'd be recognized as a distinct subgenre. Once it was, it became clear that Love Is Red were pioneers -- metallic but not metalcore, catchy but not pop punk, innovative but not post-hardcore, co-creators of something that was still taking shape at the time.
Before bassist Nick Beard co-founded Circa Survive, he was playing in the band Taken, who Touche Amore frontman Jeremy Bolm once called "the first band I heard to blend melody with blast beats." That concept might not seem crazy now, but there weren't a lot of bands doing that kind of thing in 2004, when Taken released their essential EP Between Two Unseens, their final release until their 2018 reunion EP With Regard To. The EP's influence on bands like Touche Amore is easy to hear; the instrumentation is heavy but gorgeous, taking notes from post-rock, post-hardcore, metalcore, and more, and pairing it with Ray Harkins' scream, which is equal parts throat-shredding and heart-wrenching. There's almost a prog element to the layers of lead guitar, but Taken bottle up all their sprawling ambition into the concise context of hardcore. Taken could've been a blip, but fortunately their influence lived on through some of the next generation's most prominent hardcore bands, and now they can be recognized for what they always were: a band truly ahead of their time.
As bands like American Nightmare, The Hope Conspiracy, and Modern Life Is War were shaping melodic hardcore in the States, Winnipeg's Comeback Kid were doing the same in Canada. They came out swinging with their 2003 debut LP Turn It Around, but they really tightened up their sound for their 2005 sophomore album 2005's Wake the Dead, their first for Victory Records and first produced by Descendents/Black Flag drummer Bill Stevenson. It also ended up being their last with original vocalist Scott Wade. With the extra push from Victory, the title track ended up being kind of popular at the time -- more popular than most of these bands were -- but this album had a lot more to it than just its one big single. It's a concise LP that packs 11 songs into less than 26 minutes, and it never lets up on the intensity once. It's dark but catchy, Scott harnesses a perfect mix of aggression and emotion in his pained shouts, and Bill Stevenson's production still sounds crisp over 15 years later. Comeback Kid are lifers who are still doing great stuff today, but Wake The Dead defined an era. It was at the forefront of the burgeoning early/mid 2000s wave of melodic hardcore, and its success has only seemed more deserving over time. 2ff7e9595c
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