Suicide Silence - The Cleansing (2007)
And here we have the grand poobahs of everything that is awful and kinda good about deathcore. Everyone knows these guys and every metal fan has heard them so it's almost pointless to go in depth about their sound, but it's still worth mentioning that even though Suicide Silence are the ultimate stereotype of breakdown-core, they aren't all bad.
I've listened to bits and pieces of their discography and could give a **** for the most part, but this album is one that I still come back to, even if only for a couple songs at a time. Yes, they only really have the one song that they've milked for their entire career, but in small doses that is actually kind of a kickass song. On other albums, it's too mediocre for me to care, but on their debut
The Cleansing it is in full force and shows off a band who have zero talent at anything except being intense. And boy are they surprisingly intense.
I think there are basically two things that make me vaguely dig this album but nothing else they've ever produced: the energy and the production. They were still a new band who I assume were still riding high on their initial inspirations and still thought they were the bestest baddest band on the scene and still believed they had potential for bigger and better things (erroneously), so their delivery of their one song is full of all the bile and ferocity that is required of an extreme metal band. Their production is also not so mindlessly downtuned and muddy as so many other ****ty bands. I don't know if this is because they had their own ideas of how they should sound or just didn't have the money to produce anything particularly polished, and so ended up with actual abrasiveness and treble.
Their other two aces in the hole I suppose is that they had breakdowns that were in fact heavy, and a vocalist that, while totally generic, ****ing ripped. His death metal growls and screams may not have been quite top shelf, but he used his tools with all the energy and charisma of any better singer.
I don't generally need to listen to this album that much, and usually not for very long, but I do still listen to it on occasion. So, if you don't know much about deathcore and need a crash course in everything that it is and isn't, then you could do way worse than
The Cleansing. Just don't expect the moon.