PLANETARY DUALITY

Wow! Talk about a mind-blowing album! The few samples I'd heard of The Faceless didn't impress me that much. So I figured I'd take the plunge and went and got their latest effort, Planetary Duality. And I was absolutely floored by it. If there was a blueprint for making technical death metal, I'd say these guys have written a pretty detailed one. This album clocks in at merely under thirty two minutes, but music of this kind doesn't need to take up much time or space. The Faceless may very well be a band to pay attention to in the years to come.

The Faceless plays a brand of technical death metal that reaches the complexity of giants in the genre such as Cynic and Atheist while adding a few elements of deathcore and metalcore. The vocals are very brutal as one would expect and the music is no less brutal. But there are melodic elements that appear in glimpses every now and then. Derek Rydquist's vocals are very much in the realm of metalcore and death growls, but guitarist Michael Keene adds some variety with a few clean vocals and the use of a vocoder. The music itself however is absolutely flooring. These guys have some serious chops, and hearing the brief bass riff and arpeggio guitars in the intro of The Ancient Covenant really helped seal the deal for me. Each song feels like it's composed of hundreds of riffs, and each one is almost as mind-blowing as the ones that come after it.

I'd love to give this release 5 stars, but it has yet to stand the test of time for me. So I'll give it 4 for now, but I am very likely to move this up to 5 eventually. Fans of technical or death metal owe it to themselves to check this out.