Review: Intolerance by Throwdown

The idea that Throwdown's doing what is ostensibly a back to their roots record is a little bit ridiculous. I say what I'm about to say with no malice intended, but it isn't like Throwdown got too heady or too arty for anybody. They either consciously decided to be or evolved naturally into a bit more of a groove metal band, but it isn't like somebody going from Venom and Tears into Deathless would find themselves going "Who are these people, and what did they do with Throwdown?". Regardless, after four years the hardcore band that became metalcore that became groove metal has become hardcore again. The haters can trade in their Phillip Anselmo comparisons for Jamey Jasta, Vendetta 2.0 is here.

This record is so clearly a conscious decision to strip things back down that a lot of comes off as disingenuous. To a certain extent, I'm not the audience they want to reach. I've never understood the straight edge movement, and on songs like Avow it is made very clear that they are a part of the Throwdown legacy, but it feels like they're playing those notes so hard in an attempt to bring people back that I can't buy them as a personal stance. It comes off as "Oh man, straight edge is hardcore isn't it? We're straight edge, have been for twenty years!". I mean, if you want to jump into a pit, this'll get the job done. The music's fast paced and brutal, no question there. But hardcore and punk have such ideological goals, and Dave Peters feels like such a literate, thoughtful guy (his vocabulary is way better than three quarters of the singers in any genre today, I'll give him that) that I feel like certain intellectual expectations are not unwarranted, and I don't feel like Intolerance meets them. At this point, when these guys rail against social injustices I feel like telling them they aren't the underground anymore. Fight or Die is a perfectly fine statement to get a crowd riled up, but if it's going to be thrown out there as a rallying cry on a societal level, somebody else is going to have to do it methinks. I don't want to stay stick a fork in Throwdown, because they could come back with something else that convinces me, but this particular chapter in their history is done. The song can't remain the same at this point.