Some concoctions are just asking for trouble. Oil and water. Lamb and tuna fish. The scotch and vodka combination Tommy Wiseau ill-advisedly forced down in The Room. I’m all for experimenting and seeing if things stick, but with some combinations, you just can’t help but think there’s gonna be an uphill battle for them to do so.

Anyway, I say all this, because hoooooooboy does Dragoncorpse offer another such concoction. The Australian/Canadian/American quintet bills themselves as “powercore” — a combination of power metal and deathcore — which is the kind of thing that A. you’ll instinctively want to have your eyes checked after reading, and B. you kinda have to hear to believe. Their new EP, The Fall of House Abbarath, gives us all an opportunity to do so. So how did it work out?

Reader, I didn’t particularly like this EP. But you might. So I’m gonna try and find a mutually inclusive way to describe it for y’all here. Care to join me?

The thing about power metal is that there’s actually a pretty wide range of sounds that can mesh with it. Let’s say you clean up some of the edges and toss in some symphonic elements — well hey! You’ve got Symphony X or (Luca Tirilli’s) Rhapsody (of Fire). But what if you went the other way, dispensing with the melodic singing and opting for growled vocals instead? Well, then you’d have a Children of Bodom or a Wintersun. Hell, Walpyrgus even blended power metal with pop-punk, and it worked!

None of these acts are explicitly power metal, but all of them at least kinda are. To me, that speaks to the malleability of the genre; it can, at least theoretically, work with just about any sonic twist you throw at it. At the same time, The Fall of House Abbarath does a pretty convincing job painting deathcore as the kryptonite to that theory.

The album’s first proper track, “Welcome Home,” is a song in two parts — and by that I mean, “two disparate parts Frankensteined together for, uh… reasons?” The song starts with a lively bit of melodic chaos that sounds kinda like the soundtrack of your favorite Ys game did an all-night cocaine bender. It’s actually kinda fun! And then, out of nowhere, the chugging starts. The once-jaunty rhythm suddenly becomes slow and mechanical. And suddenly, vocalist Mardy Leith snatches you out of your cotton-candy-and-steroids-fueled fantasy reverie and choke slams you with burly growls, bruh. “Jarring” doesn’t even begin to describe the effect. This all lasts for about 40 seconds, then it’s back to SuperMelody!™ Rinse, repeat, rinse again.

Later tracks like “A Quest for Truth” and “Fear and Hunger” operate on similar trajectories, teasing us gently with a symphonic refrain here, or a chiptune-y lead there, before abruptly bringing the pain. The effect is less a successful melding of genres and more the kind of whiplash effect you get when someone abruptly skips to the next song right as you’re settling in.

Occasionally, the band’ll sit back and allow a song to stay in its lane, with significantly more tolerable results. You may not particularly like deathcore on its own, but a track like “I Live Again” — which takes that particular sound and just embraces it, with minimal diversion — ends up feeling like a welcome antidote. Similarly, the late-album ballad, “Whisper on the Wind,” gets to just be a ballad — with a terrific duet between Leith and guest vocalist Lauren Coleman. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s not bad!

Ultimately, the fact that the EP’s best moments are the ones that all but abandon its “powercore” efforts is telling. The more Dragoncorpse tries to force the combination, the more, well… forced… it sounds. In the end, one EP is a small sample size to determine whether a genre experiment can work, and there may be a record out there that can make power metal and deathcore sing to me. But unfortunately, it’s not The Fall of House Abbarath.

Keep it heavy,

—Dan

---

The Fall of House Abbarath is available now via Shattered Earth Records. For more information on Dragoncorpse, click here.