Winds of Plague
California’s Winds of Plague might be the ultimate metal guilty pleasure. Let me start this off by saying that the awesome Metal Inquisition has already blogged about this band extensively (and hilariously), but I only recently decided to actually check them out for myself. I’m sure I’ve already lost all my kvlt points for copping to liking Annotations of an Autopsy, Job For A Cowboy and Suicide Silence in the past, so what the hell do I have to lose.
Winds of Plague get lumped in with the “deathcore” genre. I’m guessing this is because their music prominently features breakdowns and their merch is available at Hot Topic. But then again, most music critics that make these decisions as to what category/genre/movement bands get lumped into are half-retarded, and the average metal fan that supports these categorizations is full-on retarded, so we’ll go ahead and ignore the deathcore tag alltogether. If anything, Winds of Plague are a complete genre trainwreck of Dimmu/Cradle-esque Euro-symphonic metal and Hatebreed-style toughguy metalcore, and just like a real-life trainwreck, it’s nearly impossible to look away. Are they actually on to something with this rather improbable collision of styles that paints aural pictures of Jamey Jasta violently fornicating with Shagrath, spewing forth the members of Winds of Plague as their infernal rape-children?
With the release of the Decimate the Weak album, the band gained some notoriety for their mildly hip-hop flavored song “Reloaded” and video for the song “The Impaler” which features the band up in the club and exhibiting behaviors that could best be described as mad wiggerish. While the hip-hop influence seemed to get blown waaay out of proportion by some parts of the metal media, “Reloaded” does feature some of my favorite metal lyrics of all time:
“We’ve got the world in the palm of our hands / Busters fall down when we’re barking commands / Atlas ain’t got shit on our steez / kick out the chair and get on your knees”
(Music video for “The Impaler”… clearly P-Diddy ain’t got shit on Winds of Plague’s steez.)
Thoroughly intrigued by what I had heard and seen in my research, I decided to give their new album, The Great Stone War a shot. Apparently it’s a concept album about an apocalyptic fantasy battle at the end of humanity’s reign on Earth… or something like that. This, along with the album’s Warcraft-worthy album art lends yet another level of head-shaking WTF to the band’s schtick. One minute they’re posturing like gangsta rappers, the next they’re releasing an album that makes one wonder if they’re sitting around playing Dungeons & Dragons in their backwards caps and mesh shorts.
(The Great Stone War album cover… now where are my 12-sided dice?)
Ultimately, my descent into the world of Winds of Plague has left me with more questions than answers. Regardless, I can’t help but enjoy this bizarre, epic cross-genre clusterfuck, where sword-wielding, hobbit metal Tolkien-nerds collide in a moshpit wall of death with wack nu-hardcore meathead mouthbreathers. Either they’re one uniquely confused band or they simply don’t give a fuck and have no qualms about mashing up these styles, whether or not it looks good on paper and haters be damned.
