The Blackout Argument - Remedies
Lifeforce Records
Metalcore
14 songs (40:22)
Release year: 2009
Lifeforce Records
Reviewed by Goat
Crap of the month

Asking me to review Metalcore is a rather dangerous idea, as several bands and labels have found out to their cost when in my long-past days writing for the now defunct Blastwave I would vary wildly in my appreciation of insert-random-genre-here-core albums. Fine, you good people at Metal Reviews haven’t seen much of my ‘Core related writings, mostly because I tend not to write about bog-standard Metalcore because it makes my blood boil. Aside from a few notable bands, the awesome Burst chief amongst them, the trouble with the once exciting mash-up of Metal and Hardcore is that the bands all sound the bloody same, and even the addition of Deathcore to the party in the last few years has come to make it an even worse experience. Where, before, you could buy almost any album from the genre and expect the same damn thing each time, you now have the magical and exciting choice of an ever greater range of albums that rip off one of two sets of bands, Metalcore and Deathcore; listening to either is like having someone hit you repeatedly in the head with a hammer, one made of shit-coated rubber, the other made of shit-coated steel. I’ll let you work out which is which.

From what the label blurb on the back of The Blackout Argument’s new album says, it would appear that they have come to cure the world of war, cancer and teen depression through their melodic hardcore anthems, written to ‘heal the receiver’s injured hearts and souls and offer new strength and motive force to carry forward this struggle called life’. You’ve probably guessed by now that The Blackout Argument are about as original as spaceships in Sci-Fi, and you’d be right; Remedies, full length number who cares from the German whateverpiece, is a mixture of old 36 Crazyfists and old Funeral For A Friend, and that only one of those bands used to be any good and the other was hardly even Metalcore in the first place gives you an indication of how dreadful a state the so-called ‘scene’ is in anyways. I mean, who out there would buy the same album over and over again, made by different bands? I know what you’re thinking: fourteen year-old girls, but surely even they’ve mastered the fine art of internet downloading which, if you believe the RIAA, is so simple and easy that a paralysed monkey could do it blindfold.

Seriously, is there any reason that anyone would want to hunt down and buy this shit-coated-rubber-hammer-around-the-head of an album? Well, if you’ve never heard this kind of music before (presumably because you’ve been living in a cave with Osama Bin Laden the last few years) then you might be mildly interested in the chunky riffs and melodic choruses that The Blackout Argument utilise. Here’s the problem: the riffs are chunky only compared to say, Korn or Nickleback, if anyone sane and above the age of 18 still listens to them; and the melodic choruses are rubbish, vocalist Raphael having the sort of voice that we in the Metal underground got tired of hearing years ago. If you, for whatever reason, are really longing for some of this sort of ‘core, then do yourself a favour and just get 36 CrazyfistsA Snow-Capped Romance, the only melodic Hardcore album ever to be any good.

Fine, Remedies didn’t actually cause my ears to start bleeding in the way that, say, Cryptopsy’s The Unspoken King or Head’s Save Me From Myself did, but I’ll award it Crap Of The Month anyways because one, the music contained on it is so unoriginal as to be rubbish by comparison and two, because it’s 2009 and one of the first promos I receive in this bright and exciting year should not be a rubbish copy of something perfected five friggin’ years ago. True, music is unoriginal by its very design, but that doesn’t mean I can’t complain about it, especially when there aren’t even any songwriting skills to make up for it. Not that you’re likely to trip across The Blackout Argument in your online searches for new and exciting music, but if you do, avoid it like the plague. The name alone should be enough, two random words with ‘the’ stuck in front. The Fainting Quarrel. The Shutdown Disagreement. The Power-cut Altercation. You get the idea. At least ‘The Rolling Stones’ makes some sort of sense, and they were enjoyable whilst making it pretty obvious they ripped everyone off left, right and centre. The Blackout Argument don’t and aren’t, a few brain-killing listens to Remedies leaving me with nothing but the sneaking suspicion that they’ve won anyway since I spent the time writing this and thereby promoting them. Aargh!

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depending on your interpretation of ‘killing’, it’s either all of them or none of them
Goat quoted 20 / 100
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