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Endwell: Homeland Insecurity Label: Victory Records Released: 2006

Remember when saying you were ’hardcore’ actually meant something? Someone would say, “You see that dude? Last week at the club he ripped some dude’s eye out and used it as an olive in his martini. He’s hardcore!” Hardcore dudes listened to bands like Slayer and Pantera, picked fights with the punk rock kids, and downed bottles of Jaeger like they were water.

Now, thanks to those damn emo kids, hardcore has totally wussed out. Nowadays, if you say you’re hardcore, people think that means you buy eyeliner at Hot Topic and think mosh pits are locations to try out awesome new dance moves. Ever since these brats have begun popping up at clubs, the amount of songs about cool stuff like dragons, misogyny and Satan have radically decreased, only to be replaced with crap love songs about how no one can understand their feelings. One of the few qualities that emo music has is (supposedly) heartfelt lyrical content. One of the main reasons people originally listened to hardcore metal is because the lead signer screams like a demon from Hades with excess phlegm. You can’t combine the two and expect good results. Of course, that doesn’t stop whiny little brats with peek-a-boo haircuts from trying, the latest of which being Endwell with their debut record Homeland Insecurity.

Don’t let the kind-of-witty-but-not-really title fool you, these guys are about as politically relevant as Journey. Silly song titles like “Boy Meets World War III” and “Whine and Dine” try to hide the fact that they are nothing more than your typical “love bites” sobfests about how much it sucks when you love/hate a hot girl who hates/loves you. That’s going by the liner notes; God help you if you try to understand half of the growling “singing” that spews forth from lead singer Sean Murphy’s mouth. Just like every other hardcore band to come down the pike over the past year or so, the verses to all of Endwell’s songs are nothing but barely intelligible screaming, and not the good, ‘scary and kind of cool’ kind that George Fisher of Cannibal Corpse can pull off, but the ‘oh my god, someone get that poor bastard a lozenge’ kind. The fact that you can’t understand half the words that come out of Murphy’s mouth is probably for the best, though; with lyrics like “She stands so picturesque, heart beating through my chest…a feeling so unique I’m crippled by its ecstasy” being the standard, you’re just better off.

This kind of music can be done well, even if hardcore is a horribly inaccurate name for it. Some people throw around the term post-hardcore instead, but that implies it’s following in the footsteps of hardcore, which isn’t the case. Metalcore would almost work, if it didn’t sound so damned retarded. Regardless of what you want to call it, the point is that there are bands out there that do it right. Killswitch Engage isn’t half bad, and older bands that seemed to influence the genre, such as In Flames, have proven that there’s something there worth exploring at least a little bit. Endwell, on the other hand, contribute nothing except stale-sounding music, boring lyrics and a level of ineptitude that is downright depressing.