Yes, there is a difference… Some people have already asked me that question. I will try and dispel some of your confusion.
Synthcore and Coldwave are two industrial genrefications that rose out of America in the early 1990’s. And they are two of the more popular forms of industrial music not linked strictly to the underground industrial music scene. They both came out of the wake of Nine Inch Nails’ contribution to industrial music, when razor-edged guitar became an industrial staple to some and a bane to others.
Coldwave is the easier genre of the two to define in that it is guitar-laden industrial, taking hard, distorted metal-oriented riffs and layering them with electronics to make industrial rock music. Coldwave has an electro, drum-machine backbone to the music, but features heavy usage of effected guitars and the vocals usually lean a little more toward “normal” than the usual distorted-beyond-recognition vocals that have been taken up lately by the EBM bands.
Coldwave has generated such bands as 16 Volt, some of Hate Dept.’s music, Unit:187, Acumen, Chemlab, Steril, Second Skin, Cubanate, and a variety of others.
Synthcore is not quite as easy to explain. Synthcore was more of a term, like “torture tech” and “digicore” (which apply to the combined whole of industrial-rock music), that was invented to avoid the usage of that precarious word “industrial”*. It is a brother-genre to Coldwave, in the sense that some bands can veer back and forth between Synthcore and Coldwave songs on one album and in that they are essentially the same in all but tone.
Synthcore is a form of guitar-rock-industrial, but its beats are dance-oriented. Their pace does not rise as high as Coldwave songs and they stay at a danceable level. The guitar is also not as much of a focus in the songwriting as it is in Coldwave and the synthesizers and sequencing tend to make up the body of the music. Guitars are present, but they are there to add flavor to the music, not to drown everything else out.
Some of the more well-known Synthcore bands have been Apparatus, Society Burning, Razed In Black (also having gothic and coldwave elements), Christ Analogue, most of Hate Dept.’s music, Non-Aggression Pact, but there are several more in existence. They are not as easy to find, because Synthcore possesses a certain flavor that is, at times, indefinable.
One of the best cases of a band riding a fine line between Coldwave and Synthcore is the band Diatribe, who rides a very fine line between being beat-oriented and guitar-laden. Diatribe, in its unfortunately short history, wrote a variety of diverse songs ranging from the straight Coldwave of songs like “Sick The Dogs” and “Kingpin” to fantastic Synthcore tracks like “The Other Side” and “Junkyard”.
Go To Page: 1 2
