Zao reviews typically start with a recap of the band’s ultra-convoluted history. I’m not gonna go into all that; chances are if you’re reading this blog you probably know at least a little something about the Pennsylvania-based quintet. I’d much rather open by stating that The Crimson Corridor is one of Zao’s best albums, and that’s saying something for a band that’s nearly three decades and twelve albums deep into their career.
Musically speaking, Zao has always been a constantly evolving entity. From the more hardcore oriented early releases, to the chaotic metalcore of classics such as Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest and Liberate Te Ex Inferis, to the more melodic approach of the underrated The Funeral of God, they’ve never made the same record twice. That evolution continues with The Crimson Corridor, which finds the band leaning heavily into post metal territory, making for an album that’s among the most poignant and atmospheric of Zao’s works without sacrificing the band’s signature heaviness.
One can hear echoes of Isis and Cult of Luna throughout The Crimson Corridor, but Zao filter the post metal sound through their twenty-eight years of stylistic twists and turns, bending it to their will and making it wholly their own. Tracks such as “Ship of Theseus” and “Transitions” are a morass of sludgy tempos and down-tuned guitars, whereas others like “Croatoan” “R.I.P.W.” and “Creator/Destroyer” find the band mixing bone-breaking rhythms with delicate moments that at times border on full-on post rock. The biggest surprise here though is the ten minute long album-closing epic “The Web,” which moves effortlessly through a variety of sounds and moods throughout it’s run-time and sees Zao spreading their creative wings even further to produce what might be one of their all-time finest musical moments.
Produced and mixed by Dave Hidek, the album is incredibly dense; the heavy parts, which are plentiful, feel downright oppressive at times, as if Zao are piling musical cinderblocks on your chest, whereas the the more delicate sections have an airy, hazy quality about them, allowing the listener a chance to catch their breath before being dragged back down into the abyss. Hidek’s production serves to highlight the shifting dynamics of the songs, allowing one to fully absorb the sonic architecture of Zao’s pummeling fury, as well as their crippling melancholy.
With The Crimson Corridor, Zao have crafted yet another impressive release that serves to remind us why they still sit amongst the top tier of OG metalcore groups. Rather than play it safe, the band works hard to expand their sound in surprising ways, and this drive to progress beyond the confines of their musical roots continues to pay dividends. Emotionally draining, debilitatingly heavy and beautifully sad, The Crimson Corridor is a mesmerizing album that will stick with you long after it’s over.
Every Time I Die didn’t really do much for me the first time I heard them. My introduction to the band was 2003’s Hot Damn, and while I appreciated what they were attempting to do, it just didn’t click with me for whatever reason. That all changed when the Buffalo, NY quintet came roaring back with Gutter Phenomenon in 2005; that album’s combination of caustic metallic hardcore and greasy southern rock riffage totally hit the spot on songs such as “Easy Tiger” “The New Black” and “Guitared and Feathered.” There wasn’t another band that sounded quite like ETID and Gutter Phenomenon stayed in heavy rotation for quite some time.
But for reasons I can’t really explain, Every Time I Die fell off my musical radar after about a year. It could be because I was losing interest in the metalcore scene as a whole by then, or because my listening was being dominated by obscure (at the time) black metal bands such as Xasthur, Urfaust, Circle of Ouroborus and Nuit Noire, or it could’ve simply been because there was so much amazing music being released at the time that some bands, including ETID, were unfairly pushed aside.
Now fast forward to November 27, 2019. I’m watching All Elite Wrestling and a new tag team debuts by coming up through the ring canvass and beating the crap out of Cody Rhodes. The commentators explained that the team was known as The Butcher and The Blade and I immediately found myself intrigued by their unique appearance. They went on to become quite prominent on AEW television, challenging for the tag team titles and feuding with the likes of the Young Bucks and FTR. They came off like an eccentric, twisted pair of mercenaries or hitmen, sort of like Diamond Dallas Page and Danny Trejo’s characters in The Devil’s Rejects or The Plague in Hobo with a Shotgun.
Over the course of watching The Butcher and The Blade’s ascent in AEW, it was revealed that The Butcher was none other than Every Time I Die guitarist Andy Williams; it had been nearly fifteen years since Gutter Phenomenon, so there was no way I would have recognized him on my own, but just like that, ETID reentered my consciousness. At the time the band didn’t have anything new going on (they hadn’t released an album since 2016) but I filed the information away to see if this unlikely intersection of my two loves (heavy music and pro wrestling) would lead anywhere interesting.
Fast forward yet again to the end of 2021 and Every Time I Die released Radical, their ninth album overall and first in five years. I recently picked up a copy of Radical at my local shop, and after numerous listens I couldn’t be happier to have ETID back on my playlist. The band are still dishing out their unique brand of hard rockin’ metalcore on Radical, but it’s evident that they’ve also continued to evolve in surprising ways since my last encounter with them all those years ago.
Make no mistake, ETID are still plenty corrosive; songs like “Dark Distance” “All This and War” and “The Whip” are as nasty as it gets, but they’ve also learned to temper their crushing metallic hardcore salvos with an even greater emphasis on catchy songwriting, as evidenced by tracks such as “Planet Shit” “Post-Boredom” and “White Void.” The band even displays it’s tender side on the delicate, ballad-esque “The Thing with Feathers,” a song dedicated to vocalist Keith Buckley’s sister who passed away in 2017.
Speaking of Buckley, his vocal performance and lyrics on Radical are nothing short of outstanding. He switches from acidic screams and barks to heartfelt cleans with ease, matching the music blow for blow as it morphs from hard rocking grooves to all-out brutality and all points in-between. Buckley is also in absolute top form lyrically; the aforementioned “Planet Shit” in particular is a scathing criticism of post-Trump America, with lines like “Coming live from planet shit / our only hope was in a murdered kid / the one god we had went off the grid / no future with a racist past / oh but we can’t acknowledge that / so we burn a cross and pray to a flag” and “The karma wheel is flat / even the ten commandments cracked / there’s no law when the outlaw wears a badge.”
The rest of the band are no slouches either; guitarists Jordan Buckley and Andy Williams peel off riff after killer riff like it’s no big deal while bassist Stephen Miccichie and new(ish) drummer Clayton Holyoak bring the rhythmic thunder. The band as a whole sounds tight, focused and utterly ferocious, tearing through each track as if they still have something to prove after over two decades in the game. It’s evident that Every Time I Die had saved up near-superhuman levels of energy, aggression and intensity during the five years between albums and then poured all of that molten fury into these sixteen songs.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Radical sounds like a million bucks thanks to producer Will Putney (Body Count, Pig Destroyer, Psycroptic, etc.); the Fit For An Autopsy guitarist clearly knows his way around a recording studio and brings out the best in ETID here. The album is loud and heavy all hell, yet it possesses a level of clarity that’s refreshing in this era of metal and hardcore albums that are brick-walled to shit. Each instrument can be heard perfectly and Buckley’s vocals sit perfectly in the mix without overpowering the music.
All in all, Radical is a fantastic album that very likely would’ve made my year end list if I’d heard it just a little sooner. The band’s fusion of metal and hardcore’s explosive aggression with hard rock’s catchiness and groove, plus a penchant for varied songwriting is right up my alley and the more I listen to it, the more I’m kicking myself for losing track of the band in the first place. This is easily some of the best metalcore I’ve heard in the last ten years and anyone like me who has been foolishly sleeping on ETID for all of these years does so at their own peril.
I love it when my obsessions intersect, and thanks to AEW reintroducing Every Time I Die to my musical universe, not only do I get to enjoy Radical, I get to go back and discover the band’s substantial back catalog. Although The Butcher and The Blade seem to have gotten a bit lost in the shuffle as AEW’s roster continues to grow, I’m hopeful they’ll eventually get another chance to shine as one of the promotion’s top tag teams. Their gimmick would work perfectly for Malakai Black’s upcoming House of Black faction, but that my friends is another article all together.
Fledgling cassette label Caligari Records has already impressed me once this year with their maiden release, the nasty-ass blackened thrash assault of DeathCult’s The Test of Time, and just a few short months later they’re back to deliver the black metal tape TKO to the skull of 2013 with the debut demo from Germany’s Unru. Continue reading “Unru – Demo MMXIII (Caligari Records, 2013)”
Since 1995, Shai Hulud has been one of the leading lights of metalcore. I’m not talking about metalcore as in: “Hey! Let’s rip off Slaughter of the Soul and throw in some breakdowns!” I’m talking metalcore as in the metallic hardcore that evolved out of crossover; a true fusion of the heartfelt aggression of hardcore and the compositional complexity of heavy metal (ok, I know that description sounds like it came straight from a PR e-mail blast, but it’s the fucking truth).
If you were to listen to Early Graves’ Red Horse without knowing anything about the band’s history, you’d probably never guess that this is a band that has risen from the ashes of tragedy. This is not a band that sounds broken down or beaten; this is a band that sounds lean, mean and hungry, ready to raise Hell and rip some fucking heads off. It is a testament to Early Graves’ intestinal fortitude that they were not only able to recover from losing their original vocalist in a horrible accident, but to write, record and release their definitive album (so far) in the process. Continue reading “Early Graves – Red Horse (No Sleep Records, 2012)”
THKD 