French metallic hardcore is some of the most emotive and dramatic you'll hear, as evidenced by bands like Cortez, Tantrum, Metronome Charisma, Submerge, hell, pretty much anything on the Basement Apes and Radar Swarm labels. The French have an excellent knack for putting together crushing metallic riffage and majestic, intensely moving melodies without resorting to throwing in lame alt-rock choruses to try to come off as "sensitive". The second album fron the French band Gary Suicidal Kids Commando is another solid blast of epic, atmospheric hardcore that reminds me of some of the other bands that they pal around with, but GSKC also add a bunch of interesting stuff to their sound that's had me playing this album over and over lately. At their core, GSKC play a super-heavy and frantic style of metallic hardcore with complex riffing and amazing epic guitar harmonies, and fronted by some really anguished, emotionally wrecked vocals that go from layers of raspy shreiking to high pitched yelps and bestial death metal roaring. Japan's Envy comes to mind when I listen to this, and I'm betting that GSKC has been heavily influenced by the impassioned hardcore/epic rock that Envy's more recent albums have featured, but there are also huge apocalyptic dirges that invoke mid-90's Neurosis, occasional samples of orchestral film music that are looped over and over (which sounds vaguely like Morricone, but I'm not sure if it's an original piece or something that the band lifted), an entire instrumental track of nothing but gloomy cello, another track that features a great extended sax solo over sludgy, propulsive riffage, and songs that shift suddenly from cello-backed mathy arpeggios and intricate drumming to manic thrashing metalcore, like smatterings of Slint and Rachels heard alongside a freaked out, uber-metal version of Envy. This disc came out on the Scottish label Rimbaud, which has brought us some great noise-rock/sludge records in the past from Killing Spree, Hey Colossus, and Bracket.Retards.Bracket.