Every year there are a few releases that kill a genre for me. This year, Bless The Fallen’s Eclectic Sounds of a City Painted Black and White and Of The First Born’s self titled debut EP has killed melodic metalcore for me.

Terrible, terrible cover, forced song writing and vocals and a plethora of utterly contrived influences make for a quick, forgetful and sometimes downright crappy 5 tracks that often made my eyes roll.

I hate to stick it to the little label, but Year of the Sun missed greatly here. After decent releases from Dear Black Diary and What’s He Building In There?, Of The First Born Son’s debut is just a litany of whats wrong with the genre. Plying a sort of solo and melody heavy Misery Signals, Means, Rosesdead form of layered twiddly metalcore with a forced burly death core gloss, OTFBS are simply one metalcore cliche after another (acoustics, gang chants, clean croons, breakdowns, silly song titles, etc) without any song writing chops to make it at least enjoyable. The musicianship is borderline sloppy, the clean vocals are horrendous (“Paper Caskets”-good lord) and the production is empty and shoddy.

It is releases and bands like this that gives metalcore a bad name, thankfully the likes of Parkway Drive, Besieged and The Destiny Program at least make it respectable recently. Even more of a shame is that bands like The Pax Cecilia, The Fifth Sun and The Living Fields are fighting for media and fan attention amid the ranks of the unsigned and then this band gets a record deal, albeit with a tiny label (and its not just small labels, Bless The Fallen are on Crash Music), but still being small doesn’t mean you have to release mindless garbage.

[Visit the band's website]

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