(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.