Whitechapel - The Valley (2019) Review

 I can't erase these memories, but I will erase humanity

Up to 2019, deathcore veterans Whitechapel from Knoxville perfected but never questioned the vocabulary that helped define the genre’s first major wave from the mid ‘00s and onward. While the band’s earlier work leaned on archetypal lyrical violence and sharpened musical blunt force, The Valley seriously shook the waters as a fundamental reorientation of their career. Explicitly autobiographical, it’s a deeply personal concept album built around the real-life childhood of vocalist Phil Bozeman, and chronicles his upbringing in Hardin Valley (Tennessee), a landscape marked by loss, mental illness and instability. Embedded in the textual architecture of the record are his father’s death when he was ten, as well as his mother’s struggle with alcoholism and schizophrenia before her overdose several years later, often drawing directly from her journals and charging the album a documentary gravity that’s a rare bird in extreme metal. The “valley” itself functions both as the literal setting of where he grew up, but also as a metaphor for the burden of emotional desolation.

While maintaining the low-tuned weight and percussive density the band is known for, a decisive break from Whitechapel’s past sound was signaled with the record without really completely abandoning their previous body of work. Space and restraint were introduced with new dynamics, and clean vocals employed as structural devices for improved narration, allowing emotional contrast in between the brutality expected of them. A hint of this direction could have been picked up already from Mark of the Blade (2016) and the track “Bring Me Home”, but it’s embraced more fully on The Valley, as had grown the band’s awareness. In the past, I’ve repeatedly said how much of a repellent sudden and uncalled for use of clean vocals is to me, but it turns out Bozeman is an amazing singer either way he chooses to use his voice, and a driving factor on how heaviness was measured in meaning and not volume on this particular record.

The opening track, “When a Demon Defiles a Witch”, immediately introduces the new establishment. Woeful clean guitar melodies and vocals intertwined with the characteristic chainsaw offensive at a form of Whitechapel that's as ambitious as ever when it comes to recognition and applicability even to the mainstream, especially during the track’s chorus. When it’s not banging the walls in anger, its confession unfolds on a deliberate, at times almost funereal tempo and an unusually controlled vocal performance by Bozeman. The hook gets even deeper in the listener’s neck with the following tracks, “Forgiveness Is Weakness” and “Brimstone” - vintage O.G. deathcore enmity from the minds that essentially shaped it. “Hickory Creek” is the album’s most openly melodic moment (“Third Depth” comes right after), a track that departs from the band’s conventions and instead slow-builds tension, as a sense of unresolved mourning. 

To me, this piece expresses the record’s central thesis of trauma manifesting as quiet, unanswerable absence, and even explains Whitechapel’s stance on the early records, where the same trauma had the costume of pure violence instead. It may feel disorienting for the band’s longtime listeners, but remains an honest statement that probably introduced the name to a lot of new fans, or people who never bothered with them in the first place. It’s also smartly placed right before the counterpart centerpiece of The Valley, and clearly more aggressive “Black Bear”, constantly reinforcing the bridge between old and new that Whitechapel built with this album. Alongside Bozeman, guitarists Alex Wade and Ben Savage also demonstrated increased patience, allowing guitar segments to breathe and develop within nu- / alternative metal / deathcore borders, adding the occasional, splendid solo (e.g. in “The Other Side” and “Doom Woods”). 

This kind of sequencing reinforces the narrative arc of The Valley, which makes waves of ferocity instead of front-loading all the heaviest material. Considering Bozeman’s concept for the album, to me this episodical flow could mirror the way memory resurfaces unevenly, often triggered by external micro-factors or memory instead of strict chronology. The Whitechapel-stamped, breakdown-heavy passages are always present as markers of punctuation, moments of unleash that do not overload the listening process, but serve the album’s longer-term trajectory. However, I noticed some loss of momentum sacrificed for maintaining this broader picture, even though the achieved cohesion outweighs these lapses. Ultimately, the latter part of The Valley is slightly less memorable for me, but not to a point of estrangement. 

For anyone looking into the band's discography with a little bit more indifference, or anyone into American modern metal but not fixated on deathcore by any means, The Valley shows significant evolution lyrically and musically for Whitechapel. The same tendency was strengthened by the release of Kin two years later, which had approximately the same balance of sounds as this one, and it's still discussed how these two albums are the most accomplished by the band. Personally, it's always a revolver cylinder with three chambers, and this is of course the trilogy of The Somatic Defilement (2007), This Is Exile (2008) and A New Era of Corruption (2010). Each release depicts Whitechapel at a different stage of musical experience, but it just happened so that the early works fell on my lap at the right time, having somehow grown up alongside the band. A strong recommendation for fans or no fans, and oil in the fire of the haters to hate them even more.

Release: March 29th, 2019 | Metal Blade Records
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 [Great]
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