WINDS OF PLAGUE’S THE GREAT STONE WAR: TWO GUYS, A GIRL, AND A PASSABLE METALCORE

In an episode of The Cosby Show, perhaps one of the least metal sitcoms the ‘80s produced, Bill Cosby’s Heathcliff Huxtable tells his learning disabled son, Theo, that he would rather see him bring home a “hard C” instead of an “easy A” after he struggled with a particular assignment. What this potentially says about black America in the Reagan era – results don’t matter, so long as you’re working hard toward them – is possibly troubling, but when applied to California blackened metalcore band Winds of Plague, it’s surprisingly complementary. Though pulling out all the stops all the time fails more often than it succeeds, the band manage to make their latest album, The Great Stone War, a really, really fun and interesting mess. Their hodgepodge of riffs and motifs doesn’t reach an iwrestledabearonce-level of drek, but also doesn’t display the cohesiveness and songwriting prowess of, well, a solid band. But in terms of the latter, in a genre as flogged beyond death and into bone dust as metalcore, mixing it up by any means necessary has more potential to yield results than keeping your cookie dough inside a Poison the Well-shaped cutter. Complain about Winds of Plague’s melodramatic breakdown-o-rama as much as you like: at least they’re trying something different. Or, at least, different enough to stand out for the time being.

Winds of Plague’s basic M.O. is taking Dimmu Borgir’s “Progenies of the Great Apocalypse” and turning it into a metalcore SONG: catchy grooves augmented by histrionic orchestration. This would collapse into an eye roll-worthy mess (see: Bleeding Through) were the riffs not somewhat decent and the orchestrations not so delightfully over the top. The breakdowns aren’t revolutionary, but they work. Keyboardist/token hot girl Kristen Randall is trying way too hard to justify her place in the band, but in doing so, she manages to lay down an prodigious groundwork for the guitars to bounce off of just as often as broadcasting a mangled plea for attention. Though perhaps not the sort of epic they were going for, The Great Stone War’s bigness is captivating in its own bloated way. The album’s most egregious moments (Randall’s more pointless stretches of Yamaha noodling, the incredibly random emergence of tough guy hardcore vocals sporadically throughout) are absorbed in the band’s ridiculously grandiose ambition, and come off as a laughable misstep instead of an indicator of what’s wrong with the band.

What is wrong with the band, of course, is that, at the end of the day, they’re still a metalcore (or deathcore, or whatever) band. After the last decade, it’s hard to get pumped about another 35 minutes or so of mediocre breakdowns, no matter how they’re framed. But for Winds of Plague, the framing – The Great Stone War is a concept album about the final battle before the downfall of society and the apocalypse – works surprisingly well. In terms of being a good metal album, The Great Stone War is somewhat of a failure. But it’s a wonderful failure. It’s much more rewarding to see a band try and fall flat on their face in lieu of another bunch of reheated Meshuggah riffs recast as breakdowns. While the result is a slightly above average album, the effort they exude to breathe new life into a wrinkled corpse of a genre makes that “above” part count, even if it’s preceded by “slightly.”

(3 out of 5 horns)

-SO