The Red Chord - Fused Together in Revolving Doors (2002)
And now we kick off Deathcore Week (or Month or whatever) with pretty much one of the best things to come out of the movement, and possibly even the best. I honestly don't know what band would be patient zero for deathcore but one band that could conceivably lay claim, if not for being the first, to being one of the very first to popularize the genre and define its sound. It's too bad what would happen later, but this album should not be held responsible for ****ing Suicide Silence.
What we have here is obvious: brutal, techy death metal meets metal/mathcore. The breakneck savagery of Cryptopsy makes the best of friends with Dillinger Escape Plan's angular riffs, with some of the most stomping Zao breakdowns you've ever heard bringing the beer, and this house party of the damned is hosted by... the guy from Earth Crisis I guess? Insert whatever metalcore bellower you want fronting a death metal band and it works just as well.
But rather than being either repetitive, chuggy deathcore or an awkward, unfocused mishmash by a band trying way too hard to be technical, this album is totally cohesive and distinct. Pretty much every song rips and doesn't sound quite like anything else before or since, even with a legion of hack imitators desperately trying to. I'm going to review a lot of ****ing albums in the near future, and a lot of them are going to get either hate or faint praise, but this is one of the few that I can champion with absolutely no asterisk. This is simply one of the best deathcore, metalcore, death metal, or extreme metal albums you'll ever subject yourself to.