What Makes a Song Metal-Core, and Why Don't I Like It?

I've never been a fan of this kind of music, though I'm not completely sure why. There's a number of components to metal-core that I cite when discussing my dislike for it; the screamed vocals, the jarring transition between styles, the insane drumming - but as I think about it, those components exist in a lot of music that I do love, which leads me to wonder why I don't like them when they're together. So, in this post, I'm going to take each of those components and present some examples of their use in songs that I, personally, enjoy. Then hopefully I can start to understand why I enjoy them much more separated than together.

Screaming Vocals

Screaming vocals are weird for me.
   I understand the desire, and sometimes need, to scream your lyrics in a song. What better way to express your anger, your frustration, or your absolute, undying passion than to scream them out? But, of course, there can always be too much of a good thing.

   One of my favorite songs, with screaming in it or otherwise, is posted above; Beautiful Child, by Swans. The vocals are definitely screamed, but not in the same style as bands like Sky Eats Airplane. These screams are a lot more...decipherable, I suppose. They're more like furious shouts than high pitched screams. One thing that I love about this song is the change in intensity that singer Michael Gira gives these cries throughout the song. As the song progresses, he grunts through words about the things that he "holds on to," and the things he uses to "deceive [him]self." As the song continues on, he becomes louder and angrier, eventually screaming of his desire to "kill the child, the beautiful child" (the song itself is told from the point of view of some sort of pedophile murderer - but that's beside the point!), until his voice finally cracks under the immense pressure, and he ends, pleading, to "get out of my head."
   This sort of build-up with the vocals impresses me much more than the constant, high pitched squeals of SEA and their peers. It's clear that the screaming is meant to add passion and fervor to the words, but when it all is communicated at the same level, that intense passion, to me, is lost.

Jarring Transitions

   If you listen to the song from the intro post, I'm talking about the transition that can be heard around 0:35, when the music goes from intense, crunchy, non stop aggression directly to a softer, almost twinkly sung sound. For me, whenever I listen to a metal-core song, it's around the time of that transition that I decide to turn it off.

  Now, not to say that intensely different styles of music can't coexist in one four minute song. In the song posted above, Sugar Pill by Indian Summer, the song starts off almost inaudibly quiet, with plucked guitar and whispered vocals in the background. Around 1:16, though, quick blasts of loudness are presented, more and more often, until around 1:55 where the whole song bursts into a frenzy of crashing drums and screaming guitars.
  So, here's what I'm thinking. Clearly it's not the 'jarring transitions' themselves that I don't like. They can keep the song alive and constantly moving, which helps it be interesting to listen to. I think my issue with the SEA-esque transitions is their immediate-ness. The song can go from a wall of aggression straight to a pretty section with no context - I think that's what it is, really. Songs like Sugar Pill have some build to them - they aren't quick to jump from style to style on a whim, there's some sort of reasoning behind where the song goes.

Blast Beats

Oh, blast beats. How I loathe you.
   Blast beats are the intense, repetitive, loud double bass hits you hear throughout lots of metal songs, and I think they're truly the biggest reason for my dislike of this genre, and many other genres like it (black metal comes to mind). The blast beats quickly become overwhelming, and can sort-of drown out the rest of the song in their constant thumping.

  I honestly could only find one example of a song that I like with blast beats in it, and it's a pretty poor example in that regard. Around the 8:33 mark of The Antique by Kayo Dot, you can hear some blast beats come up. The thing is, though, they don't stick around. They play their part, and then they go away (transitioning into five minutes of seriously some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard - but, again, that's beside the point). Even these blast beats are somewhat subdued, and more buried in the mix, letting the multitude of other instruments ring through.
  Hunter Hunt-Hendrix of the black metal band Liturgy wrote an interesting, though completely and utterly pretentious manifesto called Transcendental Black Metal, describing the blast beat (and, in turn, hyper blast beat) as the backbone of transcendental black metal, the sort-of vehicle that can take plain, old run of the mill black metal and make it transcendental. I'm with him, in a sense - I believe that music can truly be transcendental, and one method of achieving that is through large amounts of noise and dissonance. But, in the case of metal core and SEA, the blast beats are way too high in the mix, drowning out the rest of the essential sounds that the band puts forth.

Conclusions 

So, lets put it all together. If I like each of these aspects on their own, why can't I like them as a whole? If I were to ignore the massive elephant in the room that is the blast beat, and at the risk of sounding as pretentious as Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, I think it might come down to some sense of authenticity. In music that I like to listen to with screams or jarring transitions, there seems to be some unspoken yet understood reasoning behind it. The screams represent the song's character and his increasing anger at himself. The transitions can be tracked, and while surprising, somehow they make perfect sense. To my ears, Sky Eats Airplane and bands like them seem to be following some sort of formula that says you should scream all of your lyrics in the same tone, and after a few bars switch over to a squeaky clean tone that should represent variety in the song, but ends up making it a bit more predictable. I think that might be the word I've been looking for: predictable. You know that the song is going to transition over to the clean tone, and once it does once, you know when they'll do it again. You expect the vocalist to be screaming the whole time, though there might not be an evident reason for it.
  In the end, I think it's all part of the genre. There's obviously people who like to listen to that kind of music, and plenty of bands who want to play to that formula. Formulas aren't intrinsically bad, of course - I just don't seem to like what this formula churns out.