1. Attack! Attack!
I have no idea where to begin with this, really. Just watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQVpITyOdc8 Makes me miss the days when I thought Static-X was the worst band in existence. This video alone has some of the most ridiculous shit I have ever seen: synchronized headbanging, guitar flips, hopping up and down, auto-tune effect used on the clean singing, generic breakdowns, guitarist moving left to right while squatting and playing the same damn chugging pattern, the whole band jogging in place, and to top it all off, a shitty trance-techno beat to carry the song out. Even the main protagonist in the video is covering her ears in agony as she is being forced to listen to this. They actually do this live too, only there's been reports of them lip synching the screaming and the auto-tune parts. I thought this kind of metalcore was over, but it looks like it's coming back in full force only with some added suckage. Thanks a lot, Rise Records.
2. A Day to Remember - Homesick
This band has always been awful and they put on one of the worst performances I've ever seen, but their new album reached a new level of terrible. I hope to god that this garbage isn't being passed off as melodic hardcore or Kid Dynamite would be severely pissed if they were still around. What we have here is a bunch of cheesy pop-punk songs mixed with "tough guy" rough vocals and as many breakdowns as humanly possible and guess what, every song follows the same damn formula. The album even begins with the band imitating one of their own breakdowns, how that didn't convince me to turn this shit off right there is beyond me.
3. Warped Tour
I know it's common for everyone to jump on the anti-Warped bandwagon but this year's lineup is beyond atrocious. It's almost like they found all of the worst bands around today (i.e. atrocity number five) and decided to put them on this year's lineup. Then Mr. Lyman tells all of the haters to "stop hating" and actually defends the charade of a band known as Millionaires. Of course, bands like Bad Religion, The Bouncing Souls, Less Than Jake, and NOFX were added to the lineup to keep "the punx" happy but it sure as hell isn't going to make me want to fork over my money to see those bands and put up with all of the other bullshit there. There are also the many other things wrong with this tour that have been going on for years, but I won't get into a long ramble about that.
4. Confide - "Such Great Heights"
Great, just what we need, another crappy metalcore band covering a song outside of their respective genre. I'm not a huge fan of The Postal Service; this was the only song I really like by them. And somehow Confide managed to rob it of all of it's redeeming qualities. The catchy melody, soothing sound, and decent beat are all gone and replaced with banshee-like screaming, a reappearance of auto-tune sung choruses, and more generic breakdowns on top of other things. Look out Atreyu and Crazytown; you both have a new challenger for "The Worst Cover Ever" contest.
5. Crunkcore
This is something far, far worse than the "generic-core" revival going on that was mentioned earlier. What we have here is a ton of bands mixing the worst of rap and mall-screamo together in one big ol' clusterfuck to make some of the worst fucking ever. Not only does it sound terrible, just reading the lyrics to some of these songs will make you want to vomit. The biggest offender is obviously Brokencyde for that case, but they are just one of many of these awful excuses for bands that have been suddenly appearing as of late, each one having a contest to outdo the other in terms of vulgarity and awfulness. Hopefully this trend will die out just like all of the other ones before it but it's getting to the point of unbearable. You know it's bad when 3OH!3 have a top ten song.
(Corey)
Honorable Mention: Scarlet Johansson is planning a duet album with Pete Yorn. Even the thought of Johansson being allowed near a microphone again is grounds for inclusion on the atrocities list. (Michael)
