Wow, welcome to 2011, boys!
Remember back then, when people pretended that dubstep would be the next big innovation to come to heavy music? When Korn released that album that not a single soul wanted? Well, our man PhaseOne is bringin’ us back, completely unprovoked and without prior consent. For, you see, PhaseOne’s debut Transcendency not only featured the usual collaborations with fellow dubsteppers (and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, for some reason), but a number of metalcore bands of not-insignificant size and clout. This was in 2019, by the way.
That’s not strictly unique to PhaseOne, mind. People like Illenium will roll out an errant Spiritbox or I Prevail team-up, out of some misguided notion of ascending past genre, probably. The approach taken by PhaseOne, however, is more akin to thinking the twin-headed bulldozers of metal and dubstep are ‘sick’ and ‘epic’ and not a freedom-from-torture violation. Except that’s not even what TERRANOVA is the majority of the time. PhaseOne’s dubstep is the sort to devour its collaborators as soundly as possible—loud, turgid, guttural, and deeply unpleasant to listen to.
It is this kind of dubstep, after all; very little has aged worse than it. The fact that TERRANOVA is at its best when it sounds the least like itself doesn’t so much speak volumes as scream them on high, arms aloft. DIVIDE’s core mood might be that of a Marshmello preset, but Micah Martin’s Jared-Leto-as-a-TikTok-emo impression effectively funnels the album’s entire stock of expressiveness into it. (It’s also barely a dubstep song, which works tremendously in its favour.) On the complete opposite end, though, is RUINS, basically formless and truncated as it is, but with the sampled growls and clogged-sink drops that represent this fusion’s absolute worst traits.
Yeah, the ‘fusion’ aspect is still be paraded on TERRANOVA, despite bringing precious little nutritional value. For one, anything explicitly metalcore is relegated to window-dressing, more often than not. It’s borderline miraculous that Banks Arcade are credited as a full unit on PULSE and allowed some moments of full-band performance, because it’s a rare thing indeed. Compare that to SOS, where the contributions of Make Them Suffer are stripped down to Sean Harmanis and Alex Reade providing vocals that are serviceable and precisely nothing else. Future Static’s Amariah Cook could pass off even more convincingly as an anonymous EDM plugin, though the drop that continually trips and treads on itself ensures she’s never the worst part of REDSKY. Meanwhile, SHADOWS gives Scro (who isn’t even the metalcore singer, by the by) the luxury of caustic shrieks and a screamo vibe, as hideously overmixed as it might be.
Often, the collaborations on TERRANOVA don’t feel as though they’re coming from a place of inspiration, but rather happenstance. There’s no need to parade this metal edge around when so little of worth is done with it and the strengths of these named collaborators aren’t being respected. The core idea never gets past its larval stage, which seems disappointingly commonplace here. There’s a ‘narrative’ set up at the very beginning about the vengeful earth entity in the title that could have links to PhaseOne’s own ecological work, but it can’t seem to dropped quickly enough. By RESET—another barely-sprouting swerve, this time into MC-fronted drum ‘n’ bass that’s never revisited—it’s basically not a component anymore. By LULLABY with the most trite possible ‘twisted nursery rhyme’ shtick from HVDES, you wonder what point this album is aiming for, full stop.
It’s not an easy question to answer when the tiniest morsel of worth needs to be wrung from TERRANOVA by near-deadly force. It’s already deeply unfashionable, clueless of what to do with the assets at hand, and a severe chore on top of that—what’s left? In a ‘crossover’ space that’s not exactly unfamiliar with underwhelming, PhaseOne is hardly even a presence among the rest. It’s leaden, clattering noise without even the energy to sustain itself, let alone quality or spark. Even if you’re the most hardened dubstep junkie the world has ever known, whose taste hasn’t budged by an atom’s breadth in 15 years, is this doing anything for you that nothing else will? Probably not, so in the two worlds that TERRANOVA is looking to occupy, it fails it one and produces little but apathy in the other.
For fans of: Excision, Flux Pavilion, Skrillex
‘TERRANOVA’ by PhaseOne is released on 30th May on Sounds Of Mayhem.
Words by Luke Nuttall
