There's something about Canada that creates interesting takes on metal and all its wonderful subgenres. We've had Voivod creating space thrash, the evergreen genius that is
Devin Townsend who can adapt almost anything to his own inimitable style, and
Cryptopsy who managed to take death metal and inject it with a crazed level of technicality and brutality. Now we have
Dancing With Paris, a band who take your normally despised basic metalcore template and twist it about a bit to create something rather good.
Opening track '
Bled Dry' cracks off with some great grating groove riffs, almost more deathcore than metalcore, before opening into some catchy clean signing choruses which are more reminiscient of
36 Crazyfists or, eurgh,
Fall Out Boy. Thankfully, those sections are kept to a minimum throughout the album, and most of the vocals are of a harsher variety, which suits their hardcore riffing better I feel.
The problem with most metalcore acts, I find, are a lot of them become very samey after a while. You'll find two or three excellent tracks on every album but thats about it.
Dancing With Paris don't really suffer this problem on this EP; whether that would remain true of a full release I'm not sure, but their EP flows pretty well, and the heaviness is only really broken by interlude track '(Boardwalk)', which reminds me of
Isis or
Pelican's calmer moments. The tracks are pretty short; the band don't stretch out their music longer than is necessary, which helps add to the longevity. 'Hardwalk (of Champions)' sounds a lot like
36 Crazyfists gone deathcore, and the opening of 'Orange County' could be from a
Meshuggah b-side.
I like these guys; they seem to be able to throw little extra elements into their musicto keep the interest of the listener. People are pretty sure metalcore is stagnating, and I agree. But its no reason to avoid anything tagged with it, and especially not these guys. They can make you mosh, dance, and sing along without feeling guilty. Recommended.
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