Flying On Clipped Wings

Ah yes, what is screamo? Well if you’re reading this you probably have your own conclusion made about what the term means, given how abused it’s been in terms of describing any music with harsh vocals. However in this case I’m using screamo in its truest sense, that blend of hardcore punk and emo, well emocore back when it was Rites Of Spring and the Revolution Summer of 1985. It’s a multifaceted, intense genre of music, and I’m going to talk you through my journey of discovery with it, how I came to love it so much. Even if you don’t walk away from this article buying the entire Majority Rule or WristMeetRazor discographies off eBay, at least you’ll have insight into a genre which is often deliberately inaccessible. I first found out what screamo was through trawling Wikipedia, as I was prone to doing once I discovered the internet, yet in terms of listening to it, that came in 2011. Free CDs with a magazine I read regularly introduced me to The Saddest Landscape, Touché Amor

"Mathcore, what's that?" I hear you ask. "Genre names are getting too complex these days, do the bands sing about mathematical constructs?" you type in the comments section of a Facebook post mentioning The Number 12 Looks Like You to get three likes and a haha react. The truth is that mathcore is one of the most interesting and technically complex offshoots of heavy music. It's characterised by weird time signatures, odd rhythms, experimentation, dissonance is used quite a bit too. Its earliest roots are in the experiments on Black Flag's seminal  My War  album, but it became a fully fledged thing in its own right with the rise of metalcore in the 1990s, Deadguy kicking things off with their noisy, dissonant, off kilter metalcore, Botch throwing down the gauntlet for technical complexity in a sea of bad Earth Crisis clones, and in 1999 the world was forever changed by the incendiary  Calculating Infinity  by the sadly departed Dillinger Escape Plan