The Hindu Wheel of Time, or Kalachakra as it is known in Buddhism, consists of the idea that the earth is perpetually cycling through a series of recurring ages. People are reincarnated, the same cycles come and go. Great events take place from time to time serving as mileposts on the otherwise interminably long road of world history. These great events leave an indelible mark on the world, shaping and redirecting the course of all future happenings--the life of Christ, the giving of the Buddha's Dharmas, the creation of the printing press, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Hardcore has been around for close to twenty years. In that time, there have been a few epochal events and a lot of dead time. The majority of the bands that have lifted the hardcore banner have been desperately unoriginal. They have also often been violent, petty, inept, juvenile, and in some cases downright laughable. To be in a hardcore band doesn't even mean that one can necessarily play an instrument anymore.
Fortunately, groups like Minor Threat, Refused, Converge, and the Dillinger Escape Plan have arisen at key moments and recast the vision for a scene prone to creative lethargy. Newfound technical proficiency and lyrical depth have served as periodic breaths on the dying flame of hardcore. Of late, the gradual rise in popularity which punk rock has experienced over the last decade has begun seeping into the hardcore realm. While still far less accessible sonically to the public, hardcore has seen an undeniable rise in popularity since the beginning of the new millennium. The scent of profit follows hard on the heels of the popular, and corporate interests, smelling a chance to make a buck, have started latching their fangs into hardcore and snaking their way through the manhole covers and into the underground.
One tangible side effect of increased corporate interest has been the recent swell of bands seeking to merge hardcore and metal with other genres. This has led to the creation of what are, depending on your opinion, illegitimate offspring who exist simply in order to be marketed, or beautiful children who push the limits of a style of music which has for too long been so enamored with itself that it refused to morph. Lots of bands are incorporating melodic singing, a new idea which is already close to becoming stereotypical. These attempts at singing are the most insidious of the vines wrapping themselves around the "new new school" of hardcore. This is true mostly because the majority of vocalists who got their gig by virtue of being able to scream like a banshee are not possessive of voices in which you would want to hear "Happy Birthday" sung to you, let alone something more sonically challenging. The result is a re-lowering of the bar which the seminal few I mentioned above have worked so hard to raise.
Given the current trends and the steady influx of "hot new" cookie cutter bands with dyed black bangs my skepticism has been incrementally increasing. So, it was with a natural incredulity that I greeted the rave reviews for a new group out of North Carolina who were supposedly pushing boundaries no one else has been willing to touch. Then I received their debut album in the mail and had my doubt flipped on its head. I say this with confidence--He Is Legend will make you think. They'll force you to make a decision about their music and in the process you'll find that all of your preconceptions of what hardcore can be and what it really means to push limits and play with boundaries have been given a thorough workout.
When I first heard He Is Legend I was struck by how clearly I could pick out the different influences in their music. The album's first track, The Seduction, opens in a punk explosion with the band slamming through a simple chord progression as a drum roll ramps things up. Schuylar Croom's vocals come early, and it's appropriate that the first time we hear his voice it's in the form of a sort of half-sing, half-shout. Appropriate because this calibrates our perceptive compass for the rest of the album. His shout/sing hovers in the middle of his range and, while appealing, leaves room for him to play his stronger cards later--his pure singing voice, and his death metal hardcore scream.
Croom has an excellent singing voice. Perhaps too "pretty" for some--and he does flirt with whininess at times--the guy can not only carry a tune, he can use his voice like an instrument. His ability alone throws him into stark relief against the backdrop of his peers. It doesn't stop there though. The man also has a fantastic hardcore vocal, a throaty affair that dwells in a cave located at least three octaves below anything he would be reasonably thought capable of if his singing voice was an indicator. Still, it's not nearly as visceral or incendiary as a Tim Lambesis or a Daniel Weyandt. Croom's hardcore voice has something of a "hard rock" tint, like what you might get out of Korn's Jonathan Davis on a good day, mixed with a little bit of chin-lowered-to-chest deep lung bellowing a la Karl of Martyr AD. The mixture is just the first of several ways in which Croom spontaneously breaks out into his own unique rock persona. The semi-awkward arm flailing he does on the video for The Seduction proves this point nicely. He honestly doesn't seem out to impress anyone. This is again evident when he's shouting out an unabashedly un-hardcore phrase like "shake that thing" or "break it down". Honestly, when was the last time you heard a hardcore singer actually tell the rest of the band to "break it down"? Ok, the dude from Every Time I Die does it almost every show, I know, but he's not sober.
These indicators speak to the lack of care the band has for what other people think about their music. The album is a veritable buffet of styles, not all of which are cool right now, and some of which are decidedly un-popular. The Seduction is a good example of the album's melting pot feel. The punk intro continues through the verse and then drops into a catchy riff for the chorus, with the guitars shrieking false harmonics on the last note of each bar and Croom dropping into his hardcore vocal. What follows is a sort of eighties/southern rock post-chorus complete with a guitar line straight out of the Lynyrd Skynyrd discipleship manual, followed by a punishing uptempo jam for four bars leading back into the verse. There's a great two part breakdown toward the end of the song which cuts things to half-time and then quarter-time.
The fact that the stomping passage back into the verse, perhaps the catchiest part of the song besides the chorus, only lasts for four bars is indicative of the songwriting ideology on the entire record. It's almost as if these were authors writing a novel so huge--War & Peace, Clarissa--that they've simply opted to leave the expansion of their ideas to the listener's imagination. There simply isn't enough time or sonic space to explore all the ideas that these men have cooking in their heads. So we get things like the immaculately metal final ten seconds of The Creature Walks, or the Carlos Santana intro to Dinner With A Gypsy. You're left wanting more which pretty much sums up the entire album.
What is so, dare I say it, amazing about this record is not the fact that He Is Legend has attempted to bring a lot of styles together. Other groups have tried that and come up with a terrible sludge. What's amazing about He Is Legend is that they have formed such a cohesive whole out of the elements they've brought to the table. Whether it's the Motley Crue strut in the beginning of Eating A Book, the gorgeous and soothing latin fret magic of Dinner With A Gypsy, the raucous swagger of the title track, or the spacey ambience in the middle of China White, everything blends together into a sensory experience so complementary that it's hard to believe that this is the group's first album.
This sense of a band creating something beyond their years is evident in the lyrics as well as the music. Wit is in short demand these days. The loose detective narrative of the title track is nothing if not clever, opening with the lines "Heather's gone / She left a note / He Is Legend / is all she wrote." Eating A Book poses the quirky question, "Don't you think it's strange that I've been reading?" Besides wit there is commentary on scene politics, musings on relational issues and even some good old American post-modern ambiguity to be mined throughout the entire album.
It never ceases to amaze me how complacent people are when it comes to the things they spend their time and money on, myself included. The world has sadly always been a place where the beautiful and popular prey not only on the weak, but on the beauty of free expression and the freedom that comes from honest, disinterested art. The mediocre succeed where the honest and visionary are marginalized. Good Charlotte tour stadiums while Belle and Sebastian will almost assuredly never play for more than a few hundred people. The infuriating and ironic truth is that hundreds of bands in the hardcore/hard music scene over the last few years have been pretending to be "all about the music" and to be doing what they want because it's reflective of who they are, when in reality they are all about fashion, or popularity, or whatever else you can name that people sacrifice being true to themselves for in order to lay hold of.
Suffice it to say that He Is Legend has not done that. They have truly chosen the high road and as a result will undoubtedly take flak from those who love to hate and from those who do not understand or appreciate the ambitious and un-self-conscious approach they have taken to their music. This is the price exacted from the pure for their integrity and in my opinion a price worth paying if it means the deliverance of such rich, layered, fun and engaging work to a public starved for music with substance. He Is Legend, I lift my glass--here's to you.
4/4
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