Wristmeetrazor – Degeneration
Release Date: 29th March 2024
Label: Prosthetic Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Metalcore, Metallic Hardcore.
FFO: Dying Wish, Knocked Loose, Hatebreed, Year of the Knife.
Review By: Jeff Finch
It seems I’m always up here talking about Metalcore and how it’s such an interesting genre, and maybe that’s just because I have a tendency to want to tackle Metalcore more than I actually realized. Especially when it comes to those ferociously angry Metalcore bands that focus more on beating a listener into submission, like Dying Wish and Year of the Knife. So, it’s with all that in mind that Wristmeetrazor is the focus on this review, bringing about an onslaught of intensity where the average song length doesn’t even hit three minutes. A twelve round beat down, as it were, since Wristmeetrazor rarely pulls any punches on this release.
Opener Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead assaults us from the get-go; thrashy, punchy, unhinged, an absolute fury that any human would be hard-pressed to not feel amped for, the track is basically 80s thrash coupled with acerbic vocals and a monster breakdown full of down-tuned, chugged triplets, not even hitting the three-minute mark before the clean melody and shrieks of Static Reckoning bombard us, reminiscent of 2006 era All That Remains in the opening, but kicking that sound away almost immediately with blast beats and vocals spewed with pure vitriol, almost Zao-esque in nature. Mixing tremolo riffs with frenetic double bass, the band perfectly transitions into a mid-tempo riff fest introducing clean vocals, kept back in the mix a bit so as not to be overwhelming in their delivery and the swift stylistic change. The cleans aren’t of the pop-punk variety, which somehow seem to find their way into heavier tracks like this nowadays, so the transition isn’t completely derailing, actually a bit somber. Quickly finding a way back into the main groove, the band fires on all cylinders until about the halfway point of the track when we’re blasted with another breakdown that brilliantly transitions back into the tremolo riffs and black metal intensity.
And while the entire album really is basically an unrelenting barrage of intensity, some of the random moments on the album really stick out and demonstrate that the band isn’t just all about lather, rinse, and repeat Metalcore; for instance, the breakdown in our opener is interspersed with 80s synth/laser sounds, random but fun, while Negative Fix fuses with Nu-Metal, some of the brief samples standing out along with the clean vocal melodies, the real noticeable moment at the tail end of the track, the clean vocals coupled with a meaty riff that feels ripped straight from early Sevendust. Meanwhile, our final track, longest at just north of 5 minutes, Greatest Love Offering in the History of the World, contains a bevy distinct portions to the song, shifting from thrash to ambient melody to pure silence, before roaring back with a ferocious guitar lick leading into an uplifting beat before shifting into Nu-Metal, the vocals layered, the bass just oozing from the background; the whole thing feels subdued, oddly intriguing, the main ferocity bouncing back and forth with this mellower landscape throughout the duration of the rest of the track, a fine way to end the album as the vocals fade to black and the music follows suit shortly thereafter.
Quite frankly, this new Wristmeetrazor is another win for the band; absolutely savage throughout, the band finds a way to introduce a great deal of melody and enough changes to keep a listener absorbed throughout its admittedly short 34 minute runtime. While any fans of Metalcore and metallic hardcore will likely walk away from this more than pleased, even those that don’t necessarily gravitate towards those genres will find something to like here; the tremolo riffs and shrieks, along with the callback to Nu-Metal, yield a sonic landscape that, while primarily Metalcore in nature, nonetheless will intrigue those that aren’t a fan of ‘modern Metalcore’ where melody and catchiness is a greater asset than unfettered aggression and ferocity.
(4 / 5)
