Amon Amarth vs. Parkway Drive

A friend of mine asked me a bit ago to check out Parkway Drive. Despite them being a metalcore band, and therefore unable to ever earn my full respect, I said I'd check them out. And I meant it, damn it! It just took me a bit to get around to it. But the metal gods have given me a grand opportunity to check out this almost-metal band in an environment that I feel completely comfortable in: a battle to the death.

Loudwire is doing some band vs. band poll battle thing over on their website (vote here) and the current battle is Amon Amarth vs. Parkway Drive. It seems that sites like this are doing these types of things all the time. Whatever generates traffic I guess.

Here's the two songs that they posted:





By the way, if I haven't already said it, Deceiver of the Gods is an awesome song and it really sounds like the album is going to be another great from Amon Amarth. But I said this post would be about Parkway Drive.

Let's get all the good things out of the way first. Wild Eyes starts out surprisingly good. The chanting crowd at the beginning is pretty catchy... after you get past the damn 40 second sound clip. I can imagine this would be pretty sweet at a concert. Skipping ahead a bit, the band has a pretty talented vocalist. I'm proud to report that there are no whiny clean vocals or anything approaching them in the entire song. The drummer is also good, mixing up his beats a lot throughout the song and pulling off some admirable blast beats. The guitars, while much less talented, have some pretty good melodeath parts here and there.

Now for the bad. After the great beginning with the chanting, the song goes right into a damn breakdown. And then it seems every 30 seconds another breakdown comes along. They also have the terrible metalcore cliché of going from one breakdown into another. These guys don't even know how unappealing this is, having absolutely no musical integrity for an extended period of time. Breakdowns, when done right, can really help a song. I don't understand why no core band can ever do it right though. Besides that, the song just isn't very interesting (save for a few parts). It's kind of a shame, since the band shows promise at multiple points throughout the song before falling into yet another dreaded breakdown. 

Help, I'm falling into a pit of breakdowns!

And don't get me started on the damn music video. One of their guitarists has a stupid baseball cap on, the vocalist takes a stupid stage dive right before his next line and the whole stupid set is just dirty. They should have really had a shower before filming this, yeesh. Also, why are there girls in the audience? This is not like any concert I've ever been to...

It's pretty obvious that Amon Amarth is going to win this battle. At the time of writing this they have a 75% lead. All the core kids in the comments are pretty mad. It's pretty funny. You should definitely vote if you haven't already, and if you have time check out the comments section. Also be sure to check out Deceiver of the Gods when it's released June 25th.

-Zombie Viking