In the past decade or so, deathcore as a sub-genre seemed to stray from musical clarity, unique ideas and personal identity, into what can only be crudely described as a pissing match of breakdowns surrounded by recklessly thought-out filler. In more recent times this competition has died out slightly, only to be supplanted by core so blackened, you have to check your phone to see if you’re on a new track yet. Hell Is Here, Hell Is Home is an oxygen mask in the murky depths of dead horse mass grave.
The album bundles in with hit single ‘The Maker’ which is rammed full of variation, whether that be in terms of the riffs or the beat, there is a massive amount of substance to just one song here. It really highlights that the band is keeping in with the themes of revenge and murderous lyrics packed with visceral rage, reminding you that this is Bodysnatcher and there will be no remorse. It must be highlighted that the breakdown of this song is immense, but it was in no way crowbarred in for the sake of it. It’s so in-keeping with the song’s theme it rounds off the latter half masterfully. Unlike previous records from the group, it seems like the sludgeiness one might expect from a Bodysnatcher record, is ditched for a rapid pace, which will be spinning rooms across continents in the near future with ‘Writhe and Coil’ and ‘Plague of Flies’.
Followed by ‘May Your Memory Rot’ you are now met with a song you can tell is a highlight for this entire record. It seems deeply personal with the toxicity, spiked into the the venom-glands of the lyrics spat by Kyle Medina and backed up with a destructive driving force by Chris Whited. The Hardcore influences in the call-outs is not to go unnoticed and is a homage to the sub-genres roots, something that is often replicated but rarely felt by the listener. The record goes on to be much of the same during the next three tracks with ‘Violent Obsessions’, ‘No Savior’ and ‘Blade Between the Teeth’, with that classic Bodysnatcher muddiness, spiced up with some faster sections for you and your friends to two-step to before getting crowd-killed by a 6ft2 father of four, proceeding the next call-out.
As we approach the album’s close, ‘Survive or Die (feat Scott Vogel)’ has to be mentioned, once again highlighting the hardcore roots. This feature section is done so perfectly, as it feels like a Terror song, covered by Bodysnatcher, sandwiched between a Bodysnatcher song. How cool is that? ‘Hell is Home’ draws the blood-soaked curtains, in a classically brutal way, but is faded out with a melodic eerily melodic section which encapsulates the past ten songs beautifully.
To reiterate, this is just what the sub-genre needs, in fact, this is what heavy music needs; visceral and raw emotions that are believed and felt by the band, packed into ten hand-nurtured songs. There are currently very few bands in the space of such heavy music who you can tell, for lack of a better term, are “real”, Bodysnatcher aren’t writing about a rough break-up or how much they hate the government, they’re writing about the explicitly violent nature of the human condition and the shadows we tuck these vengeful thoughts into. It would be quite easy to say that this is one of the best deathcore albums released in the last ten years, if we are going to be talking about last twenty years, it could very well be up there with Suicide Silence’s The Cleansing.