Review Summary: Nightmare Virus pounds another nail into nintendocore's grave.
As the band grabbed my hair and screamed for unwavering attention (just look at that album cover), I knew exactly what torture awaited me - nintendocore. Perhaps one of the worst genres ever (besides crunkcore), nintendocore takes the “br00tal” breakdowns and screams of metalcore, and crudely mixes them with cute, vintage sounding synthesizers that are reminiscent of classic video game soundtracks. Allow me to tell you a short story that describes my imagining of how nintendocore formed. A group of nerds meet every Saturday in a basement to play old school video games such as The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, the original Mario, etc. During the heat of battle, one of the nerds breaks the silence and asks, “Why don’t we form a band?”. The idea is tentatively accepted, and realizing that they only listen to video game soundtracks and some (supposedly awesome) metal albums, they create the genre of nintendocore.
Although the concept of this genre sounds interesting at first, all interest is lost when the music kicks in. Dawn of the Final Day is the worst song to begin the album with. It starts abruptly by seemingly catching the band in mid-sentence, which ruins all first-impressions. Also immediately irritating is the poor sound quality, which means muddy instruments, and incorrect sound levels. As a result of the poor sound levels, the vocals are murderously loud, which is an incredible nuisance considering how awful they are. The vocalist is named Irby (no joke), and does both growls and clean vocals. The style of the band is closely related to post-hardcore, as obvious by the singing/screaming tradeoff (similar to Silverstein). His growls are surprisingly passable, but as predicted, his singing voice leaves nothing to the imagination, in the worst possible way. He attempts to compensate for it by casually shouting instead of singing, but it ends up as a hilarious attempt at sounding epic.
Apart from the vomit-inducing vocals, the rest of the instruments are actually passable. The guitars synch with the synthesizers alright, the synthesizers synch with the drums alright, and the drums synch with the guitars alright, etc. However, the synthesizers often contradict, as if they were recorded for a separate album and then slapped on this one. Also, the bass guitar (if there is one) is inaudible, and the electric guitars get the job done, but they are usually morbidly typical and bland. Out of all the instruments, the drumset is the only one played well. The beats are solid and can be surprisingly good at times. Unfortunately, one well played instrument is not enough to save this album. Overall, the awful singing and the poor execution of ideas drown the album.
