Review: Jarrod Alonge - Beating A Dead Horse
Jarrod Alonge has been a popular YouTube personality since early 2014. He is most known for his "Every ** Vocalist" series and his videos about fake band profiles. In late 2014, Jarrod launched an Indiegogo campaign for $12,500 to fund a full-length parody album and was funded $18,262 in one month. The album is composed of parodies of genres like pop-punk, metalcore and even crunkcore. Let's take a look at the album and see if parodies can actually sound better than originals.
There are 15 different songs on the album with parody bands such as Amidst The Grave's Demons, Sunrise Skater Kids and $wagCh0de. The first song on the album is "The Swimmer" by Amidst The Grave's Demons. This is an obvious parody of the song "The Sinner" by Memphis May Fire. The most interesting thing about this track is that it almost sounds better than the actual song and actually maintains some originality.
Looking at the album as a whole, most songs are a direct parody and are the lyrics and instrumentation are very well thought out. Another song "Take It Easycore" by Sunrise Skater Kids sings about how important friendship is and even has a 30-second interlude of just saying the word "friendship". This is a direct parody of Chunk! No Captain Chunk! which is proved by the french accent and flag shown by the end of the video. A track by fake parody band $wagCh0de, "2 Freaky 4 Da Club" takes a stab at BrokenCYDE and how partying is the best.
I'm going to give this album a solid 9.5 out of 10 stars. There's very few problems with the parodies and it goes as far as having a metalcore medley. Jarrod collaborated with many Youtube personalities and actual band members of the genres to create something truly amazing. Every song on the album is an accurate representation of the genres they set out to parody. I recommend this to anyone who likes any sort of alternative music or fans of the bands that are parodied.