GOD FORBID's DALLAS COYLE On Differences Between Hardcore And Metal

GOD FORBID guitarist Dallas Coyle has written the latest entry for his weekly column on MetalSucks, "The Hard R." In this installment, Dallas talks about coming up as a metal band in a scene dominated by hardcore, and the way a band's environment can affect their music. An excerpt from the blog follows:

"I believe that people are affected by their environment more so than the other way around. When we were writing 'Reject The Sickness', we were just finding out about the hardcore scene in New Jersey, which at the time consisted of a lot of types of styles, mosh-core, thug-core, rap-core, emo, tech-core. In NJ, at that time everything was hardcore. There was no metal scene. We were the metal band in NJ at the time. We had a particular incident at Obsessions nightclub that ejected us from playing with bands like MORBID ANGEL and TESTAMENT to playing shows with bands like FOR THE LOVE OF..., TRAIN OF THOUGHT, E-TOWN CONCRETE, CLUBBER LANG, NJ BLOODLINE, CANDIRIA, just to name a few. We were all metalheads when we found this new form of aggression in the hardcore scene. By our peers we were NEVER labeled hardcore but we played so many hardcore shows that people who didn't know us thought we sounded like BULLDOZE and FURY OF FIVE. I guess that's guilt by association. We'd play shows with THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN at The Plum Street Pub which was a seedy bar which held only 80 people. We first played with LAMB OF GOD when they were BURN THE PRIEST in Reading, PA at this guy Alex T's garage. It was a broke-ass show. They played in front of us and we played in front of them. I think one person showed up. My point is, in writing 'Reject The Sickness' the environment we were in affected the types of songs we'd written. If you listen to 'Reject The Sickness', you hear the metal but you also hear the brutal breakdowns, the chaotic arrangements, the dissonant guitars that reeked the scene at the time. Not to say we were copying our peers but the environment we were in influenced the music we wrote and recorded. When we got the finished copy of 'Reject The Sickness' everyone in the band was stoked because the quality of the recording was just so good at that time in 1999, that we impressed ourselves and our peers. We gained a healthy hardcore following and starting playing those bigger clubs because of that hardcore following we generated. The music on that CD obviously wasn't typical because only a week after we finished the master Century Media called and said they wanted to sign us. This is the point where the direction of the band changed. Our environment had changed."

Read the entire blog entry at www.metalsucks.net.