(Andy Synn burns down genre boundaries with the new album from Killing Pace)
Did you know that I did my disseration on the concept of “categorical perception”?
In particular I was looking at the ways in which your (for want of a better term) perspective – dictated by your social, cultural, and even geographical, influences – affects your perception of things like language (specifically speech sounds), colour, and more.
Why am I mentioning this? Well, it’s because the way we categorise sub-genres also seems to follow a lot of the rules of “categorical perception”
Let’s face it, Death Metal that becomes increasingly more “blackened” until turns into “Blackened Death Metal” can easily just tip over into straight up Black Metal (and vice versa)… Hardcore combined with Metal becomes “Metallic Hardcore”, which in turn, at some point, becomes “Metalcore” (a term which itself means different things to different people, depending on their background and history), and so on…- to the point where even if the sonic spectrum appears pretty continuous we generally choose to draw some pretty hard lines and separate it into discrete little areas, if only to help us more easily manage the sheer wealth of music we’re exposed to.
But what’s really interesting about all that – to me, anyway – is the fact that while these sub-genre categories can be a useful tool, sometimes how you choose to categorise a band says more about you than them.
Which, of course, brings us to the new album from self-declared “Hardcore Punk Metal” crew Killing Pace.
You see, while HCPM (I’ll give you 3 guesses as to what that stands for… and you won’t need the other 2) is undoubtedly a Hardcore album – and a ridiculously heavy one at that – there’s a point where Hardcore that’s this aggressive, and this intense, is better categorised as Grindcore, right?
Songs like the absolutely unrelenting “Digital Evisceration”, the blistering blast ‘n’ chug of “Afflicted” – and, of course, the furious, forty-six second spasm of “Suffer” – definitely err more towards the Grind than the ‘core side of things, after all, so I definitely wouldn’t begrudge you the decision to think of Killing Pace more along those lines (and I doubt the band would either).
That being said, the rampaging riff-assault of “War Machine” (an early favourite) features both a fret-melting solo and a bone-crushing climactic breakdown, deftly dragging the band’s sound in a more Death Metal influenced direction (aided and abetted by some assistance from Antichrist Siege Machine) – as does the unflinching, in-your-face chug ‘n’ churn of utterly crushing closer “Resist/Desensitized” (which also features an appearance by the Scarab boys) – while back-to-back bruisers “Suppression” and “Mangled State” reaffirm the band’s dedication to the heaviest and most extreme end of the Hardcore spectrum.
And what this ultimately means is that, for all its unwavering commitment to almost unrelenting shock and awe savagery – the “almost” there referring to the nasty, grinding (though not in that way) crawl of “Predation”, which is a direction I’d love to see the band explore more in the future – it’s actually possible to hear this album in a variety of different ways, and possibly have a different favourite track (mine is currently punishing penultimate cut “Pulled Into the Gears”, though that could easily change), depending on where you draw the line(s) between Death, Grind, and Hardcore.
So maybe the best way to approach this album is just to push play on the opening title-track… and realise that, whatever you call it, this is “Hardcore Punk Metal” that only cares about one thing, and that’s being true to itself.