Metalcore: what is it, and how is it different from death metal

I made a post here some time ago about what metalcore was, and it caused a bit of controversy. It wasn't clear that I'm coming at this issue from an old school metal point of view, because old school metal is where the fans really flock and stay for decades at a time.

The two are really radically different genres. The approach to riffing in old school metal is designed to make short melodies or "phrases" complement each other, and have that define structure; in metalcore, like in rock or punk, riffs fit into a pop song structure, even with some modifications.

Here are some traits of metalcore and how they differ from old school death metal and black metal:

• Breakdowns, using jazz-style drumming, instead of cadence as in old school
• More major key riffs sliding into minor key, instead of the reverse
• Fewer chromatic and Locrian modes and more pentatonic and melodic scales
• Rhythmic emphasis is not on cadence but offbeat
• A tendency to mix styles, throwing punk and rock and jazz riffs on top of metal ones
• A focus on interrupted repetition and not a building of atmosphere

Like all genre names used in this column, my use here is meant to be descriptive: if you like metalcore, this is the kind of music you're looking for; if you like old school death metal, it's important to know that you may not find metalcore to your taste.

The way any type of music is composed reflects that it's trying to communicate and so the world of the musicians into which it invites you. If you want to go on a dark death trip with apocalyptic imagery made violent and fun, you might like Slayer; if you want to feel like you're rushing through a museum of possibilities, you might prefer Psycroptic, which is metalcore or its subset, deathcore.

This is Joe Healey, guitarist for Psycroptic. Notice how the riff he plays, when slowed down, would fit easily into any rock song, but doesn't sound as metal as slowed down technical riffing from an old school band like Gorguts.

Notice how radically different this sounds. It's an intensification of the sound of Black Sabbath, but run through the filter of hardcore punk like Discharge: chromatic riffing, so it's separate from normal harmony, but the plus side of that is that it needs to make riffs work together melodically to make a song. Here's some Discharge because they are a personal favorite:

It sounds different -- more like the old school metal, and less like rock music, doesn't it? After punk music was birthed by greats like MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, The Ramones and helped by Motorhead, it was abrasive, simple music that hardcore bands like Black Flag, Cro Mags, Minor Threat, The Exploited, Bad Brains, Discharge, GBH and Amebix took to the next level. After that, pop punk (Ramones, Sex Pistols) and hardcore punk (Discharge, The Exploited) sort of had an offspring which was part progressive, part indie rock, leading to other genres like emo and post-punk.

Much of this was inspired by Ian Mackaye of Minor Threat making his own "more punk than punk" band, Fugazi, and the Black Flag guys going prog on The Process of Weeding Out. No one knew what extreme to next take punk to, and so like rock and roll before them, they went through a period of making longer songs with more musical involvement.

After grindcore found a way to make punk more extreme while keeping it simple, bands started mixing the blistering speed of grindcore and its fast and therefore difficult riffing back into punk, and they got interesting hybrids like Human Remains, which is the ancestor -- in my view -- of most metalcore now:

You've got fast death metal riffs, punk riffs, and aggro-rock (think King Crimson) riffs in there, but the songs develop more like those post-punk songs mentioned above. Unlike old school death metal, the format is flexible enough to include just about any genre, as bands like Candiria were famous for doing.

The genre got a big upgrade in the late 1990s from post-death metal bands like Meshuggah and Necrophagist, whose distinctive style of specialized sweeps and clashing drums made them an immediate fan favorite. However, we don't want to slight any of the many punk, grindcore, rock, jazz-fusion and metal bands whose contributions added to the metalcore genre.

Post-punk was late 1980s; pop punk was early 1990s; grindcore blossomed in the early 1990s, and proto-metalcore like Human Remains came about in the mid-1990s. That takes us to the present, when metalcore is a huge genre ranging from All That Remains to Between the Buried and Me to Psycroptic:

All of these bands are united by one thing -- a similar way of writing songs. They can mix it up any way they want, or make it more or less extreme, but this is how they write and it's worth respecting. So is old school death metal, and knowing the differences makes us respect both genres more.

Death metal bands like Gorguts converged upon the same idea as metalcore, but kept their allegiance to old school metal songwriting, and so never quite got accepted by the metalcore audience and in some cases, were not accepted by the old school death metal audience. But as the difference is quite audible it's worth mentioning.

I'll cover more of these genres in the future but wanted to kick off our new metalcore section with this one, so we could all be clear on what metalcore is and why it needs to be respected as a genre in its own right.