Attack Attack’s Stick Stickly in 500 words.

If you’ve never heard of Attack Attack! Then good news! You missed the template that Asking Alexandria* stole off. Attack Attack! dropped Stick Stickly a year before Asking’s debut, making it quite clear who ripped off who. But in Asking’s defence**, Attack Attack! were waaaaaaaaaaay worse. The video alone drew a lot of ire from metal fans for popularising crab core and being a shining example of mop-headed teenagers ruining the genre. I’m not going to talk about music video though, the song is way worse than video ever could be.

The electronic elements are shameful. They’re bad and Caleb Shomo*** should still feel bad for writing them. Just whirring uninspired synth sounds blaring over generic riffs, which wouldn’t be so bad if a) Enter Shikari hadn’t done it so much better a year prior and b) not for those auto tuned vocals. I don’t know where this officially started and but it needs to be banned from Metal. Some people try and pass it off as a stylistic choice. Those people are in plain faced denial because it’s like saying not being able to sing in key is a stylistic choice which is what resorting to auto-tune is. If you like the sound, fine, but don’t pretend it’s a bold artistic choice, or that a non auto-tuned performance wouldn’t be better.

The guitar work sucks. Just chugging to give a ‘B00tal’ feel, no nuance to it. On another song it could be a basis for something interesting, but here they’re the basis for the horrible electronic elements. The screaming is technically impressive, but I’m not a fan of Austin Carlile’s vocals. There are no levels to it, it’s the same wail every time and there’s no variance to them. That’s on his more tolerable stuff, here, it’s that wail, along with generic guitar work and those terrible electronic elements.

One thing that’s never talked about this song when it really should be, because it makes it so much worse are the lyrics. Without going into detail, it’s a song about god. One of the most infamously bad metal-core songs, is a Christian metalcore song. Metal isn’t about worshiping Satan, but I’m not too sure how many church carols would be improved with screemo and techno elements. This song is a lazy and failed experiment with a tenuous religious link, which just so happened to ruin metal core for a couple of years to come. To sum up in one word: Blasphemous.   

*You know? One of the most popular metal acts of the last 6 years?

** Not that their early stuff deserves it by any means.

***Yes the same Caleb Shomo from Beartooth. Started as keyboard player for this band and was promoted to lead vocalist after Austin Carlile (Yes that Austin Carlile) left and remained so until the band spilt. If you like them, you should pick up Attack Attack!’s last album This Means War, it’s pretty much Beartooth’s blue prints.