You got your aggressively pop jam on my aggressively angry metal blowout…
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[5.00]
Alfred Soto: The title suggested a K-Pop extravaganza, and in a sense it is: the chewy pop center at its heart tastes like Savage Garden or something. Don’t skip those metaltastic power chords though.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: Thick, rubbery guitar riffing and the Cookie Monsteriest growl this side of 2002; you wouldn’t even need the scratching to ID this as nu-metal, freshly risen from the grave. And what an unexpectedly welcome zombie! Tyler Carter layers sugary harmonies over lines like “I don’t want to be tough/I wanna make sure they can see me cry” while Michael Bohn hollers “SUCK SHIT. YOU MEAN NOTHING,” which is so platonically ideal as a Hot Topic-core sentiment that I hope someone’s used it before. Carter counters with a stuttering, delicate bridge that is rhythmically tricky enough to tempt some reviewers into calling it R&B. Sounds more like New Found Glory to me, which seems oddly suited to such a dudely critique of normative masculinity.
[8]
Anthony Easton: I love how buoyant that mid 90s riff is, like pop floating up against a screaming ocean of metal rage.
[8]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: When reviewing Of Mice and Men’s back-to-basics metalcore a few weeks back, I found myself wondering about how the genre had changed after its mid-noughties commercial peak. To make sure that times have changed, we have bands like Issues — bands that merge standard-issue rage belches with mismatched genre explorations. In recent years, doses of Fisher Price EDM have been the way forward for the most eclectic of brocore acts; on “Stingray Affliction”, yelped temper tantrums give way to middle-eights containing pop-punk-via-Trey Songz impressions. Is it progress? I guess. Is it progressive? Did you not read “pop-punk-via-Trey Songz impressions”?
[4]
Crystal Leww: The moments of this that are pop punk than nu-metal are really good. I can’t believe this musical movement is coming back.
[4]
Patrick St. Michel: High school wasn’t that long ago, and I remember the kids who loved Slipknot tended to also be tipped off to “A Favor House Atlantic” before anyone else. Which is to say, Issues’ growly scream-pit swiveling into pop-punk confessional back into guttural meat hook is not breaking any new ground. We already lived through Linkin Park once; we do not need more nu-metal with turntable scratches. Every generation needs to find music that balances anger with sweetness. I just wish the kids didn’t have to deal with that faux R&B bit near the end.
[3]
Megan Harrington: This is pretty awful, but not for the obvious nu-metal reasons that suggest themselves immediately. There’s no reason why a blend of metal, hip hop, and R&B couldn’t work, even though there’s no precedent for it working. CountrEDM fuses two genres that appear opposed on the surface but complement each other in strangely pleasant ways. What plagues “Stingray Affliction” is the lack of fusion. The song may as well organize each of its influences into its own suite, there is so little interaction between the metal, the hip hop, and the R&B. Ultimately, this is nothing we haven’t heard before. Issues come as close as Linkin Park ever did to fusing rock with more contemporary pop music, but the outcome remains heavily stratified.
[4]
Brad Shoup: Oh sure, when BiS does it it’s awesome.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: The transition from the J-pop-ish section from 50 seconds in, back into the vocal fry-laden metal the track opens with is extremely dramatic and effective, a great Impotent Dude Primal Scream moment of the type beloved of nu-metal practitioners. Yep, it’s two great tastes that taste great together. It’s just a pity the trick’s only used once. On the second go around, the pop side of this cookie ditches the exhiliration in favour of a dodgy R&B jam and the ideas don’t seem like they mix that well and the execution just isn’t as fun — in that regard, it’s less like a delicious black-and-white cookie and rather more like Linkin Park’s similarly disjointed “Crawling.”
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: I think Soulseek’s chatrooms are leaking.
[3]