SHADOWS FALL = SHRED FOR ALL!
You know what I love about Shadows Fall? They’re just pure fucking shredders. It’s unfortunate that they got caught up in the whole “metalcore” tag, or for that matter any scene-y genre label at all, because if not for this fact they’d be in a completely different position today. Think about it: when Of One Blood came out in 2000 (and to an even greater extent, Art of Balance in 2002), no one in America was pedaling the kind of ’80s-influenced shred Shadows Fall were offering up on the regs. If the whole Massachusetts scene hadn’t blown up the way it did Shadows Fall would’ve surfaced as an oddity in the American metal scene, shredders amongst hordes of non-shredding masses. A true metal band in a sea of… not true metal bands.
All this occurred to me for two reasons:
1) A piece Christopher R. Weingarten wrote for Idolator about why jam band fans are better than indie rock fans (bear with me here):
1. Jam band fans don’t care about pesky shit like aesthetics.
Why does Bonnaroo get to have awesome, underrated thrash metal band Shadows Fall, but the Scion Rock Festival doesn’t? Because indie rock kids only care about fringe genres when they are fashionable. Shadows Fall, being a real metal band, bring a lot of zitty teenagers and honest-to-god longhairs to their shows, so indie blogs and mags don’t touch them. God forbid someone break up the steady stream of warmed-over stoner rock and black metal bands (only the ones Hydra Head endorses!) in your RSS, guys.
So true, amirite? Shadows Fall were on top of the metal pyramid in the mid 2000’s, and the minute metalcore blew up they were no longer cool. Total bullcrap.
2) Watching Kobra Kai, a band featuring Jon Danais and Matt Bachand of Shadows Fall, tear through a full set of ’80s covers at New England Metalfest including Cure, Van Halen, GNR, Queensryche, Metallica and many more. And it dawned on me that the dudes in The Shads are ’80s metal kids at heart, directing their influences through a modern metal formula — something I realized the very first time I heard Shadows Fall but had since forgotten.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because it seems that Shadows Fall have been unfairly tagged as something other than just pure, aggressive shred, and I will not stand for this classification. Word on the street is that The Shads have a new album dropping this year on Ferret/ILG, so we’ll see what they have to offer this time around without the baggage of a major label with major monetary expectations.
-VN
