played drums on the band’s first EP, which also featured All That Remains’ Phil Labonte. The War Within is the only Shadows Fall album appearing on this list, but the band almost deserves a slot based on the members attached to the band. While neither of the New England trifecta of those two bands and Unearth would probably want to label themselves as “metalcore,” they represent the heights of the genre, for better or worse. Killswitch Engage’s The End of Heartache made an impressive debut at #21 on Billboard’s top 200 chart in May of 2004, but on September 28th of the same year their New England brethren Shadows Fall’s fourth album, The War Within, did them one better, debuting at #20. Go back almost exactly five years, however, and the sound was as close to a revolution in metal as there has been this decade. Mainly because the fusion – of metal and hardcore, of screamed and sung vocals, of Sweden and America – is a cliché by now, a dead horse that’s been beaten by countless formulaic bands that forgot to write actual songs. In 2009, “metalcore” is a polarizing word.
Shadows Fall, The War Within (Century Media, 2004)
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