There's a battle being waged
here between the deathcore nature of the band and additional elements that
actually add something to the mix. There's so much variation that it keeps you
off guard. At times I'm like, man this is really cool, and others where I'm like
man, this is pretty terrible.
Lyrically, Winds of Plague is trying to assert how much they don't give a fuck,
what they don't give a fuck about, what they think can fuck off, and when the
fucking beat is going to drop. That's about it. At times they can almost come
across as insulting to the intelligence. Vocally there's a division between the
more gutteral vocals (though still not too low on the overall scale) and your
hardcorish interchimer (who's more abrasive to listen to).
Guitar-wise, expect massive amounts of chuggery, which fluctuates across the
scale from shitty to fairly good. The leads are decent when they show up.
Stylistically, there's a fair bit of core to wade through, which is fairly awful
(as in "California", which is enough to submarine any interest from the
objective metalhead).
When they add melodic elements though, they tend to be cool. "The Warrior Code"
has some kind of old-school martial arts theme as the backdrop, and is generally
solid, but it's also short as it's more of an interlude. The keyboards are a
strength whenever they show up, but they're kind of tossed in there and
infrequent. The smattering of songs from their previous albums I've heard also
strike me as being more melodic, so this would appear to be a step in the wrong
direction.
While I like a couple of tracks on the album ("The Warrior Code", "Monsters"),
the majority of it is sub-par, and to be honest, I'm probably more tolerant of
this than most metalheads will be. I guess you could say people are going to
avoid this like the... Winds of Plague.
