The other day while driving in my car with my significant other and a mutual friend, I let Spotify radio play random Slam cuts. Occasionally skipping acts I didn’t like, occasionally proclaiming that another was good, it led to my partner turning around and jokingly asking my friend “Does it not all sound the same to you?”. I understand that, to the layman, it might appear like all Slam acts do the same thing at all times. Of course this isn’t quite true – even the bands that lean the most into neanderthal territory do more than just slamming, and other genres have similarly hardened tropes. Slam might be hard to understand for the casual listener, the poseur and the weenie, but it is undeniable that, while the technique on how to Slam is a pretty narrow and well defined spot, there are many roads to Rome. In fact, I would argue that in the evolution of Slam, most bands would start out as something else and then arrive at Slam by chiseling away the imperfections bit by bit. One might start with the Brutal Tech of Suffocation and realise that all that excess material around the breakdown in “Liege of Inveracity” is just fluff. Maybe the snapback-clad Deathcore scene is where the journey begins and a Deathcore writer might have realized that you can actually play more than one note during a breakdown. Today’s band started in a different scene altogether, but might be closer in spirit to Slam than any of the others.
Embrace Your Punishment belong to the group of slammers who can genetically be traced back to the Beatdown Hardcore scene. Beatdown Hardcore is the most brutal of Hardcore subgenres, involving a strong Metal influence and riffs as celestially heavy as the planet carried by Atlas on the album cover. Embrace Your Punishment have all the trademarks of the sound, where downtuned power chords reign supremely and always feel ten times louder than you think your speakers can put out. They are good at it, too, and listening to Made of Stone at work saw the risk of my crowdkilling instincts activating, mauling poor clients and coworkers in the process. Naturally, Made of Stone comes with the usual pitfalls of the genre, as well – there is as little variety as there can be, adding some ironic aftertaste to my great opening monologue for this review. When the rhythmic and physical impact is the core idea of your sound and you are also committed to playing at a certain tempo for most of your album, there is little creative room to explore beyond the pillars of Beatdown. Embrace Your Punishment will get points from me for trying, though. The album has guest vocals by three guest vocalists. Misery Index‘s Jason Netherton is a fitting choice, but doesn’t stick out particularly. The two that really elevate the album are the guesting track with Kirk Windstein, whose painful and pressed sounding vocals add a strangely emotional component to one track without losing any intensity and Julien Truchant from Benighted, whose more varied vocal approach towards the end of the album adds an additional level of interest where there usually is none.
There is not really a need to sugarcoat it: How successful Made of Stone is completely depends on your tolerance of Beatdown riffs. I can be fond of it at times, as it reminds me of good times at small clubs and intense concert going experiences. Made of Stone is good at what it is and for what it is, but this is not an album to convert the Slam naysayers. If Embrace Your Punishment should show up at your local club next Slam night, you better buy a ticket, though.
