Whitechapel isn’t just one of the top deathcore bands… In reality they shouldn’t be considered as a deathcore band anymore but who really cares about genre labels since the oldschool fans of the band had already jumped off the train when they started experimenting their sound on “The Valley” (2019). The truth is that it is very common seeing pissed off fans when an extreme metal band starts to mellow its sound but it makes no sense to me, we shouldn’t argue about music and our favorite bands and no, there’s no need to cry on the floor, the bands can be as creative as they want and we can enjoy or reject their albums with no second thoughts unless the only thing that matters is the popularity of a band and our obsession to keep them in a narrow cult minority.
The band from Knoxville, Tennessee brought much more alternative metal elements on “Kin”, they have many parts with no distortion on guitars (even approaching some folkish paths) and of course the clean melodic almost poppy vocals of Bozeman in a big part of the compositions and the latter seems to be a hot-button issue for deathcore fans that loved the first albums of Whitechapel where they could only hear ultra-guttural barking. Bozeman is once more the main narrator that tells stories although this time he is not directly confessional since the story of the album has more supernatural elements and this makes it less realistic but it is still dark enough for metal fans. The main idea behind the lyrics puts Phil in an alternative universe where all his choices are wrong and this has disastrous on Kin.
Back to the music the band decided to leave only a few deathcore parts here and there but let’s be honest these are not the parts that will give you the chills this time but mostly the compositions that are closer to bands like Antimatter and Katatonia so yes, it’s true that I enjoyed the diversity of the album much more than on “The Valley. Whitechapel are less bombastic but they evolved nicely and I guess that this mix of two different music genres may wide significantly the audience of the band although by making this step forward they also take a risk too since the extreme fans will criticize them for Nickelback-like songs while the rest may not feel comfortable with the growls…
