Whitechapel: Recorrupted

I’m going to be very blunt: This EP sucks.

If you aren’t a diehard fan of Whitechapel, you can seriously just let the existence of this five-track EP slip by your memory registry and perhaps order the brain cell manning the registry counter to blast it into oblivion with its neuron blaster as well. One of the biggest criticisms of death-core has and will always be that of the “boring” and “uncreative” breakdowns that go chug-chug-chug for 30 seconds or more, and when a death-core band combines that with monotonous industrial beats and heavy synths in the form of re-bloody-mixes, they are simply opening themselves up to more hate from the core haters (I am not one myself, but still, monotonous + monotonous = fabulously boring). Only the first track on this EP is a new and original song, and even though it sounds generic, this collection would have worked a lot better on a whole if the next four tracks had been original songs too. The cover of Pantera’s “Strength Beyond Strength” sounds reasonably deathcore-ish in interpretation but otherwise doesn’t strike one as a superbly creative cover. Also, Big Chocolate and Ben Weinman (of The Dillinger Escape Plan) do deserve credit for their remixing skills, for they do inject some groovy sense of hard-hitting rhythmic patterns into the “Breeding Violence” and “This Is Exile”, but what are the chances of ever hearing these death-core remixes being played at clubs? The finishing track is an acoustic version of “End Of Flesh”, and while it does sound soothing and tranquil, what is the point of putting this in a death-core band’s EP?! It sounds oddly out of place, and if Whitechapel had been aiming for something along the lines of a “brutal start” and a “contrastingly peaceful finish”, they are forgetting that their greatest appeal lies in being a death-core band, and not a progressive-tech death metal band or something else along those lines.