Ariel Pink writes soundtracks to old porn movies whose sex scenes have all been removed by a particularly brutal censor. Even "brutal" does but poor justice to this particular censor's touch, who is so dependably savage that he must be motivated either by love much stronger than death, or by the sort of bored reliability known only to civil servants at work during the weary waning years of totalitarian regimes like ours. Whichever the case, the end result is the same: dialogue delivered by people whose faces clearly indicate that they have some inside knowledge about the future. This future, though, about whose nature these naked or near-naked people feel so casually assured, won't actually come to pass in the versions of these films that we shall now be forced to watch. At gunpoint, and pumped full of sedatives. And so the music, this music, breezily ushers in moments that evaporate before they come to pass.

Everytime I get ready to talk about metalcore I chicken out; so much to say, no good place to start. Somebody needs to write a definitive history of the stuff, but it won't be me, because 1) we don't get paid for this and 2) it's as near as you'll ever get to a sure thing that the Definitive History of Metalcore is gonna suck balls, because it will surely miss the whole point of everything and come off looking asinine in the process.